Large organisations absolutely do, as a function of their scale, produce pockets where slackers and incompetents can hide. They'll surround themselves with a web of process, pointless meetings, and substance-free buzzword-heavy documentation/presentations to disguise this fact. Others may become ensnared in this web, and will rightly express the criticisms that the author is attempting to debunk.
What I _have_ seen is several companies afflicted by this really strange characteristic of the software development industry: We appear to be the only industry on the planet where it is common to pick leaders (executives) that know nothing about the product or how it's made.
You can't run a bridge building company without knowing how to build a bridge. You can't run a law firm without knowing law.
You don't need to know all the nitty gritty - big picture is important - but understanding the product _in depth_ is a requirement in any business.
Understanding the product is often important, but equally often it is something you can delegate to others. It's only the younglings that think intimate knowledge of the product is the hallmark of a great leader, because that is the only thing they themselves bring to the table.
I never saw anyone just sitting around or really slacking. But they couldn't execute anything. It was depressing.
The vast majority of people have convinced themselves they’re doing good work. Then reject any suggestion they could do it better (including me).
I just wish we didn't have to rely on hiring 100 on paper workers for 5 excellent people committed to the company...
In my opinion there exist much more efficient ways for coordination: for example, write down some really good documentation and explanations that are then read by the other stakeholders, so that these, at the end, also have a very deep knowledge about the topic.
Nearly all employees have studied at a university, so the people are very used to writing texts (papers, seminar papers, lecture notes, thesis, ...).
In my experience the reason for too many meetings is rather that many managers love meetings.
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> “There is too much process and bureaucracy” [...] At a very large software company, the software matters. It may be relied on by millions of people. It may underpin businesses, infrastructure, or daily life. It may not be particularly glamorous software but it has to work. It has to keep working. Failure is not charming, and recovery is not always cheap. [...] Process exists to manage risk, correctness, and scale. Calling it “too much process” without acknowledging the stakes involved is like criticizing a bridge for having too many safety checks because you once built a treehouse with a hammer and some nails.
This is one reason. Other common reasons for so much process and bureaucracy are
- Many managers love processes, because they can "hide" their failures behind processes, and introducing new processes and bureaucracy lets the manager pretend that he is doing something to solve the problems that plague the department.
- Many processes and bureaucracy are simply demanded by the legislature when you work in some heavily regulated industry. These legal demands often don't make sense.
I wish. Most people I've known in universities seem to read and write the absolute minimum to get by.
But I tend to agree that writing is preferable to meetings in most cases. I want to try out a policy that all meetings of more than two people must produce a written artifact, or clarifying edits to an existing document, that explains whatever ambiguity required a meeting to clear up. But you also need people to read. People don't read.
People who can write clear, unambiguous, accurate technical documentation are relatively rare.
And a meeting is in fact sometimes the best way of coordination. We have a question. We have five different people with relevant input into the question. Even if all five can write well (and will do so in a timely manner), we still need to reach a consensus on what the right answer is, and to make sure that everyone's issues are heard, and that they feel that they have been heard. A meeting often does that better than shooting emails back and forth among the five people.
Processes:
Processes are often added because something went wrong (often expensively wrong), and a process was created to make sure that it won't go wrong again. But what they miss is that the process also has a cost - a dollar cost, and a time cost.
Worse, there's a limit to how many processes most people can remember. You can create a process, that's the 47th process that your people have to remember, and when they don't keep it because they don't remember it, you can blame them. So here I kind of agree with you.
> Many processes and bureaucracy are simply demanded by the legislature when you work in some heavily regulated industry. These legal demands often don't make sense.
Maybe they don't. Ignore legal requirements at your own peril, though - they can have some pretty nasty teeth.
I wish. The reality at the moment is someone gets an LLM to do it and the other person uses an LLM to read it.
> Understanding before criticizing
> Large software companies have real problems. Some are structural. Some are cultural. Many are self-inflicted. But many of the behaviors people complain about are not pathologies – they are consequences.
> If you want to criticize how large organizations operate, it helps to first understand why they operate that way. Without that understanding, the criticism may feel sharp, but it will not be useful.
I see that kind of "criticizing before understanding" all the time on HN, and while that's probably just inherent to an open forum, commenters who do that should realize it makes them come across as "less than insightful", to put it generously. Like I see tons of comments often about how managers only get to their position through obsequious political plots. And sure, that may exist in some orgs. But you can always tell when folks have never even considered the competing forces that act on managers (i.e not just the folks they directly manage, but requirements coming from higher ups, and peer teams, and somehow being responsible for a ton when you actually have few direct levers to push) and solely view things through the lens of someone being managed.
Honestly it sounds to me like the author doesn't truly understand the inherent conflicts of interest at a large company. For example a really common anti-pattern is "Nobody knows X thing is a problem my team manages in a problem (e.g. our app eats battery usage), but if I draw attention to it they'll want to measure it forever. So do not make it a focus."
In short pretty much never does any employees/manager's/executives interest align with the company.
Also, as a somewhat trivial side note, an instinctive reaction to not getting the clarity you need from a meeting is to ask for another meeting. So even if the optimal level of meetings is annoyingly high, bad meetings will probably push the level of (bad) meetings even higher. So you'll still actually have "too many" meetings.
bad meetings beget bad meetings
> If they got value from those meetings, they wouldn't be complaining.
This part actually felt quite relevant. Several years in the govt, and there was definitely a difference. Many meetings that felt inane, or meaningless to even attend, where you constantly questioned why you're even there, or bothered to show. Much phone swiping, and social media browsing. Often 10x+ attendance to people that ever participated. I often felt weird even asking anything, cause nobody was participating, and it felt wrong to even try to understand the endless charts on-screen.
However, a rare few that honestly felt quite worthwhile. We arrived, discussed what needed to said, and left with a better comprehension of the situation and the tasks necessary.
You can ensure quality by making features opt-in, having a beta program available to risk tolerant users, adding QA resources, having representative users in captivity (employed at the company).
There is no law that says that you must move slow or do less in order to be low risk, you can also do a lot, move fast, and only let the best out.
Coordination is almost free in a ten-person startup. It is still relatively easy in a forty-person company.
I used to run a dev shop and had the opportunity to work with companies of all shapes and sizes. The startups often discovered Chesterton's Fence by declaring they didn't need this or that (meetings, accountability measures, etc), only to learn the hard way why they existed.
And meetings, beauracracy, et al are rightfully criticized for being inefficient and fostering mediocrity. But I think I'd agree with the author that it's glib to say meetings are dumb, no need for hierarchy without understanding their purpose
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...
It’s only the tech industry where the voice and ego of small companies hold outsized share of voice and love to claim the contrary.
I'd be a little bit careful with this claim:
The fact that small companies can have such opinionated opinions without going bust is to me a sign that in particular for software development (but I don't claim that this is transferable to other industries) small teams/companies do have an efficiency advantage.
Many hypotheses can be formulated why this might be the case, like
- software industry is less regulated
- writing good software as the company's product requires a lot less collaboration between many stakeholders than what is necessary for producing other types of sellable products
- in software, "having a smart, though opinionated idea" is of a much bigger advantage (also for the company) than in other, more established industries
- ...
Tangential, but companies have been routinely writing and selling software since at least the 1980s, and longer depending on how you draw the line. That's roughly half a century.
At what point will being "less established" stop being an explanation for the way the software industry works?
If coordination is your limiting factor I'd argue that it shouldn't be, and you're not investing enough in removing it as a factor. Companies can use various tools to do this, for example:
* Defining directly responsible individuals / single-threaded leaders so that every choice doesn't involve massive coordination
* Putting people who work together in the office sitting next to each other most days of the week
* Or, for remote work, having a strong culture of async communication that is visible to the broader group by default, for example with Slack
Obviously doing this makes sense when possible, but in cases where you see it, it's usually due to a fair amount of work to have made this possible.
To give a simple example, I work on a class of problems that require a VP level approval for new instances of $thing. I've gotten this down to a pretty straightforward process where I can work with folks who are proposing a new instance, get things working, and then the VP usually is happy to stamp the work we've already done. Though in some cases they aren't, and they have (good, probing) questions or changes they'd like us to make. But that's only possible because I have a longstanding relationship with the set of folks who ultimately approve this kind of thing, I have worked with them on a process that they like, and I have the experience to shepherd things effectively, and their trust and buy-in. And I'd argue that my case is pretty simple, because while there are a handful of responsible people that I could go to, there's rarely any individual concerned.
Consider a different, relatively common case, of a client and a server that are owned by different teams. The client wants a feature in the server, and perhaps is willing to do some development and loan headcount to implement the feature. Who is the single responsible party here?
It should probably be either the manager of the client server team or the mutual manager of both if the teams are fairly close in the wider org, but then you have multiple indirect layers between the people doing the work (client team members) and the accountable person (server team manager), and that's the state you get to after you've done a bunch of coordination work and gotten everyone to agree to that division of labor and accountability.
Most obviously, why do executives need to be the proxy to customers? Why can’t development teams simply talk to real customers? This isn’t just an abstract idea in agile, it grew out of actual Japanese product development practices practiced at large organizations: Toyota, Canon, and others, and documented in “The New, New Product Development Game” HBR review article that was so influential to early agile.
The point that in large organizations, most of the work is coordination, again demands the question, why? It’s been understood since at least World War I by some military planners (with organizations far larger than Google) that coordinating dependencies was far more complex than reducing or minimizing them. Goldratt wrote about it when designing a project management system for Theory of Contraints (indeed, you could argue this is a fundamental learning of ToC). And one of my favorite software conference talks of all time is Mary Poppendeck’s excellent “Tyranny of the Plan,” where she notes that as computer systems have been used in planning, we seem to have become more confident but no more competent in coordinating, rather than focusing on flow, in large-scale projects.
Finally, on the importance of software created at large organizations, I agree, something that will have millions of users on day one has a greater responsibility, but that doesn’t mean that loads of bureaucracy and checking are the pathway to quality software. First of all, does anyone believe that highly scrutinized and bureaucratic functions are general high quality services? The often provide access to even the most extreme edge cases, but they do so by reducing the quality of service to everyone else. Anyone who’s ever filled out their own tax forms in the United States knows that it covers every base of possibly income, but 80% of people really only need to be concerned with 2-3 common forms, and 99% could simply be asked about 10 forms or so. Instead we have to answer questions for “directors of foreign corporations who also happen to be Us citizens,” instead of just requiring those people to fill out an additional form. And, of course, to (probably badly mis-)quote Deming, “you can’t check quality into a product.”
I would turn it around in the author: yes, the software practices operate this way in large orgs because large orgs are structured differently—but why do large orgs need to be structured that way? Is it inherent when absentee owners with low domain context (shareholders) pass ownership over to a manager? Is it because hierarchies insulate good but not great managers from genuine value creation as long as they play politics well? Is it because these are first order ways to understand complexity, and again, low-context absentee owners aren’t going to do the work to understand the more complex dynamics at play?
You could say something similar about large-scale distributed software systems. A lot of it is just the nature of distributing and managing work across a collection of "nodes" or, as the case may be, people.
This is the only part of your response that doesn't quite sit right with me. There could be many "highly scrutinized and bureaucratic functions" out there that are working very well, you just don't notice because they work so well. There could be a selection-effect here.
Quality is a big deal for me[1]. But I think you're defining "quality" too narrowly in this context. "Quality" could also mean "allows everyone, at scale, reliably, to do what they need to do." The US Tax Filing system (and its associated software) meets that goal.
[1] https://philipotoole.com/always-thinking-of-the-next-guy/
When execs dominate decisions, it’s usually because the org failed to make customer truth unavoidable.
Most process exists to protect careers, not outcomes.
Understanding why something exists doesn’t make it justified or effective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apologia
The thing this (very good) post doesn't mention is that big companies select for blub languages because that's where the most low-cost labor is, in that you can hire multiple Java developers for the cost of one Haskell developer, even if Haskell might be objectively a better choice for the project.
Corollary: it's perhaps easier to throw money at fancier hardware to improve performance, than the alternatives
In the comments I see little apologia. The article rather brings up some points which are contrarian to the common view on HN, and the people on HN discuss whether these points have some truth in them, or the author missed some important considerations, or whether the author is wrong.