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lukaszkorecki | 2 years ago
I’d would disagree - I had the exact experience that the autor described. But you are right on this point
> it’s entirely possible to build that intoxicating environment anywhere. It’s more about having a dynamic leader who assembles teams into collections of individuals who know precisely why they are there
I still think it’s related to size and bad incentives. I heard stories of people at FAANG that said that department X is like a startup but Y is soul sucking boredom
fnordpiglet|2 years ago
Specifically this is entirely false due to the existence of X:
> Is this preventable? I think not.
I> f you look closely, all these problems fundamentally come from:
> Decreased skin in the game, which reduces team alignment
> N^2 communication, which creates need for managers and specialization, which reduces individual agency and breadth of learning
> Reduced risk tolerance, which slows everything down
> #1 and #2 are inevitable results of having more employees. #3 is an inevitable result of having more users, partially due to government regulation.
I think a large company enables Y departments to exist without the company imploding immediately. Survivorship bias ensures most startups that last longer than a short amount of time to appear like X, when I know there are plenty of dysfunctional startups (a friend tells me Ghost is a great example). But due to the economics of a startup they evaporate quickly. In a large company Y departments can limp along for a long time or indefinitely because Y’s function needs to exist and the company can afford for it to suck ass to work there without it going out of business. However invariably X departments in large corporations are where the magic happens, where people want to work, and what moves the large enterprise forward.
I’d also note that not everyone wants to work in a startup environment or are able to. Many engineers got into it for a good paycheck and don’t have much interest in anything particularly dynamic or engaging. They’re perfectly happy committing once a month and sitting in meetings. That’s not me, but I can also see when you build an army, you can’t build it out of special forces only.
So, instead of saying X can’t exist, when it clearly does, I think it’s more useful to say you should be careful where you work in a large company and seek out actively the X departments by learning what Y departments look like and how to spot an X department.
dasil003|2 years ago
This is an excellent point. In my experience a majority of people value stability and predictability in their lives. They would rather have someone tell them what to do within well-structured bounds than contend with the ambiguity inherent in an early stage startup, or with solving massive product/business/technical problems with too many stakeholders to fit in a room.
I think the challenge is the people with the intrinsic motivation and stomach for the ambiguity can struggle to grow in large corporate environments that are full of good soldiers who stay in their lane. It's not uncommon for entry level ICs to come in with 3 or 4 layers of management between them and VP level, and then become pawns in middle management games, or stuck reporting to Peter-principle cases who teach them all the wrong lessons.
This is why I was really glad to have worked in startups when I was young, to really get exposed to all the moving parts and fundamentals of an operating business. It's just much easier to learn when the big picture is more legible, you have the latitude to iterate faster, make more mistakes, and see first-hand how things scale (or don't!) from the ground up. These days I see too many ivy league grad ex-FAANG who have all kinds of ideas of best practices with no understanding of why things are done that way at the tech giants, and extremely limited ability to reason from first principles about what makes sense in a different context.
dventimi|2 years ago