Close to the Problem

It's true that the best person to choose the solution is the one implementing it. But what if many people are implementing it? When you're choosing a corporate database that a large IT staff will be developing against, there is no one person closest to the problem, so the decision goes up the ladder.

My mom always buys me clothes at least two sizes too large (she's a small lady, and apparently thinks I'm a giant). I'm pretty sure almost anyone would do a better job picking clothes for me. Just saying.

Nice article. I'm not sure the organizational problem of large enterprise can be addressed from the bottom, though. I've heard enough about the many layers at Google (supposedly one of the flattest and most awesome large companies in the world) to know that just being smart and generally effective as an organization doesn't really solve it. The folks at a high enough level to sign off on "close to the problem" solutions are the same folks who are so far away. They don't know what they don't know, and so continue to do business as usual and expect to have major decisions deferred to them.

One of the problems with this argument - competence. I'm sure all the people reading HN who are not far behind their manager. But that is not the case at a lot of places. Sometimes the wisdom of a well experience manager solves a problem better than those working for him could have. As a young engineer surrounded by those I consider well experienced, I often turn to those above when I have a decision to make. The questions they ask me often lead me to things I hadn't thought about yet.

I think this concept applies to startup ideas as well, I found this post to be a great high level summary of the top post on HN as I write this (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=591607). One of the problems with young web entrepreneurs (myself included) is that we aren't "close" to the problems we often try to solve.

His premise that the further down the list the closer you are to a problem doesn't apply to all problems. I'm not closer to the problem of Global Warming that the President - probably the opposite.

> IT decisions made by upper management of a large company are almost always terrible.

Yeah, that's called power. They have it, so they make the decisions with the money. If you want to make the decisions, figure out a way to get into power.

That's Reality with a capital R, folks.