Comment by eddythompson80 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eddythompson80 | Hacker News Reader

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I have seen that too many times too in big companies, but I wouldn't say that it results in nothinghappens.jpg

It results in the equivalent of treating an infection with Tylenol rather than antibiotics. The exact symptom reported by a "Leader" will usually get fixed, but in a more of a "KPI hacking" rather than a fundamental fix to the problem. I have seen a "Leader" point to the staggering number of support tickets as a problem then have teams make it incredibility difficult to open a support ticket. The number of support tickets plummets and the first report to instruct their team to do so gets rewarded and all other teams follow suit. Have a leader point to complexity of the sign up process, and have teams "simplify" the signup process by just taking an email to create the account, then make the experience of doing anything post sign up a broken mess because you forgot to go into settings and filling up all the required details. Or have a leader complain about the install process like in this example, and have teams just bundle massive dependencies or make wide horrific modifications to the users machine to "simplify" the install process. Now suddenly installing a video editing software also modifies your default video player, your HDR or scaling settings, your audio device setup, and your keyboard layout (because why not?)

The more interesting question is why would so many thousands of people in a big firm seemingly be fine with frustrating customers and giving the appearance of a gaggle of clowns?

Standard psychology says they should be highly sensitive to status loss, but it almost seems the opposite.

>"The more interesting question is why would so many thousands of people in a big firm seemingly be fine with frustrating customers and giving the appearance of a gaggle of clowns?"

Existing in a large org over the long term becomes a game of survival. It's very much similar to the "dark forest" or the Eye of Sauron. Your number one goal as an IC is to complete the tasks directly assigned to you by a supervisor and avoid at all costs any kind of "hey you" assignments that have zero upside and plenty of possibility for downside. It would be wonderful if we lived in a world where individual initiative mattered and was rewarded, but it doesn't. It becomes "why haven't you delivered XYZ", and the vague ephemeral reasoning of "well A, B and C for team D needed fixing" is not an excuse, and now you can't pay your mortgage anymore.

Ask anyone at a FAANG and they will tell you that large corporations get flak every day for a lot of things, some justified and some unjustified. As an IC, you need to tune it all out and let the people whose full time job is to deal with that sort of thing handle it.

As you get larger there is a fire everyday and ever more competing priorities on which fires get put out.

How much money does movie maker bring Microsoft? Now which executive would want to prioritize movie maker so much that they would directionally alter the company to fix this? Consider the issue that the execs had was fixing all the issues involved a huge number of teams.

Discredit to Bill here but I honestly think he was the only one who had the power to fix this. A Jobs-like figure is the only person with the organizational power and freedom to drive details like this to completion. Anyone else would end up in a power struggle

I drown in support tickets daily that used to go nowhere. Then people started realizing that I knew what I was talking about and not some standard business user. Now I still have to open tickets, but get visibility of the people who know what they’re doing on their end (having been moved up from lowly support to oversee some ticket filling company that doesn’t know crap). We get tom complain to one another how shit is broken, wait mandatory change periods and then get something working by exploiting loopholes because some process was developed and someone put a lot of money behind it.

Large companies are why large companies are large (in IT/OT at least)

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