Lots of smart, talented and energetic people are expending most of their power just figuring out who to talk to about what or what the hell that out-of-the-blue email from corporate finance means for them.
Just figuring out how to get a thing done can be exhausting.
In the context of a startup, if you try something and fail, you'll generally be recognized for taking initiative even if the result does not pan out. At that level, learning what doesn't work is often as valuable as learning what does work. Startups often bias towards hiring people with just this mentality because that is what they actually need.
In the context of an established company, sticking your neck out is like career suicide unless it's a sure thing. Unlike a startup, you're risking an _established_ reputation on a new idea. So you end up working in an organization that has an inherently different view of risk and trying new things.
I'm not sure whether "nobody knows how to do anything" results from an institutional aversion to risk or from the natural result of hiring people that fit within that system, but the end effect is exactly as you describe. It's way too hard to do anything off of the beaten path, and trying to do anything along those lines _immediately_ results in negative feedback which makes employees a lot less likely to attempt such actions in the future.
What’s funny is that it is the attitude most people adopt in these organisations but not those who are the most successful at climbing the ladder, which you can’t really do without some boldness, bending or challenging the rules, etc, that’s how you get things done and getting things done is a quality that managenent likes.
But what is perverse is that the whole organisation is designed to prevent that. Distributing responsabilities among many people, none of who understand the whole process, all of who are just trying to apply some policies with no understanding of what these policies are meant for, and be ready to kill the company if the policy says so.
I work in one of these kafkaesque places on the business side, I remember a project manager from IT once telling me that they need to make a change mandated by the compliance department that makes absolutely no sense and would have prevented us from serving our clients. I challenge IT, no we don’t want to go to jail, it has to be done. I go to the compliance department, explain why it is a moronic decision (with a bit more tact), they agree, and reverse the policy.
And I have seen that done many many times. So many people in these orgs are paid to say no, to resist any change, or simply do not care or understand. One needs to plow through, which requires a huge amount of energy, and results in most project being half baked, over expensive or simply never getting anywhere.
That’s why large organisations, populated by otherwise smart, well educated people generate so much mediocrity.
I'm not sure what you're saying went wrong in that process. You were the one who wanted a compliance mandate reversed, so who should have talked to the compliance department about it if not you?
Rather that IT would have implemented a change even if they thought it didn't make any sense just out of fear of falling foul of some internal policy. What I say is that large organisation are pleagued by people doing things that are counterproductive either because they don't care, don't understand, or live under the fear of breaching some internal policy, instead of doing the right thing, challenging these policies when it makes sense.
You're not wrong, but I think you're looking at it backwards. Policies are just codified decisions - and large organizations make a lot of decisions. If everyone second-guessed every decision they didn't personally understand, there'd be no time left to get work done.
There should have been push-back on the change before it got to the implementation stage. It shouldn't be down to the implementor to query the decision (as they won't have full sight of all factors). That querying should have happened at the management level.
When a nonsensical requirement reaches implementation, it indicates that all the gatekeeping in place before this stage has failed.
Good points. In my comment, I was focused on the difficulties around getting the information you need and being aware of what is happening in other parts of the company, but there is also the huge factor around punishing risk-takers too.
For example, I can build a chatbot in a day that will take some load of a bunch of people in my department. Will it be deployed? No way. Will it be seen as a possible threat to people's patronage networks by cutting their teams and budgets? You bet. Will I possibly be chastised for doing something that is not in my JD? Possibly. Will I bother making it in this case? Nope.
Outside of delivering a new development or product that might need someone to stick their neck out, the larger the company mostly the worse they get at everything. Sales, support, raising an invoice, paying your bill, correcting a mistake, you name it.
To customers it really does seem as simple as passing Dunbar's number means support will probably suck or border on non-existant, pre-sales questions will go unanswered or get a process driven irrelevant answer, invoice payment gets ever more lax, and so on.
Or maybe it's that companies smaller than this still have enough people around that care.
Yep, can attest to this. One of the reasons why senior people are extremely productive & valuable is that they seem to know the landscape more than others, and therefore know who to talk to & where to look.
Half-jokingly, as soon as an "individual contributor" knows enough to be productive, they're promoted to management.
WRT the half-joke, this is one of those truisms that probably has a lot of basis in reality, but there needs to be a corollary about the choice of the individual as well.
I was heavily invested in our public facing technical side, working a lot with our on-boarding, teaching newbies to be really self-sufficient, working through the technical issues with our clients directly, and then I was asked to take on a Management position.
I liked the pay raise, but I made it clear exactly what I wanted from the position, and though we butt heads on it still, my boss respects the fact that I still am heavily invested with our technical team while doing the Managerial work. We had to revisit the job definition a few times to find a description that matched what I was (am) doing and also made HR happy, but we did it.
The point is that in some cases at least, a promotion to management doesn't have to be a death knell for "individual contributors". It depends on the company's willingness to accommodate the wants of the individual, and the individual's own desire to continue contributing. I know too many people who did get the Management golden ticket and relished it for just being an excuse to boss people around and make more dashboards in our CRM.
At the same time, I have read from people making the transition from IC to manager that it's a mistake to hold on to your technical work. Surely this will vary from person to person, company to company, and team to team, but I find it hard to believe that people with 10-15+ years of professional dev experience are best utilizing their skills sitting far away from the code; at the same time, they can't get too focused on it and ignore their management responsibilities.
I wonder how much of it has to do with team sizes. I feel like a 4 person team (inclusive) would be ideal for a manager who also wanted to act as a technical lead and contribute a moderate amount. Any bigger, and the scope of what your team does, as well as the amount of time needed to devote enough time to all your employees, starts to get too big for you to contribute at a technical (e.g. source code) level. Yet we continue to take great technical workers and put them in this weird PM-hiring-HR-architect mixture of a position where they barely continue to leverage their skills anyway
It's important not to so thoroughly explain the problems that big companies have that you argue them right out of existence, because they clearly exist and as others point out, actually routinely pull off feats that no startup could dream of.
I was wondering if this is happening only in my company. I am frustrated and outraged that there is no easy way to find out who is responsible for X, nor what is person Y responsible for. I wrote and email to our CIO, explaining my struggle, but he does not seem to care.
Lots of smart, talented and energetic people are expending most of their power just figuring out who to talk to about what or what the hell that out-of-the-blue email from corporate finance means for them.
Just figuring out how to get a thing done can be exhausting.