Having worked for a while at one of these enormous companies I will take a stab at answering this:
Tech is an afterthought for most of these companies. Most of them are natural monopolies. Insurance for instance is a business that works such that the larger you are the lower the risk and cost. Take the ACA: many nonprofit startups tried to join the ACA marketplace to compete with the Big Boys. Essentially all failed.
These companies have so much money that they can afford to do things like 10 million dollar POCs (which I've seen). Often they have literally 5+ different teams doing the same exact thing and will pick the best out of that list.
In some cases (I won't say which) they essentially launder profits through the "tech" parts of the company. They basically optimize for cheap people they bill out to the "real" company at some enormous fee.
As I wrote in a previous post, this is about to change I think (hope).
How fast this change is coming for a particular company depends on how inert the customer base is, and how much of the customer "journey" is digital.
For example, insurance -- I've worked at one of the largest (if not the largest) insurance companies in the world. Obviously they make some money, or turn over at least, but the customer base is usually pretty static.
What I mean is, you get an insurance, and you rarely change unless something drastic happens.
This allows for a big enough company to completely manhandle IT/tech/dev -- spend $100 of millions on project spanning years, and ending up with a lot of money in the pockets of "the usual suspects" and often software that does not work at all.
All legacy cruft still intact, and just another layer of expensive crap that business users hate.
Still, the business of insurance is heavily tech & software dependent. So much, in fact, that systems down means “no business”.
I've become somewhat cynical with regards to the enterprise tech business, but I've seen these patterns repeat at too many places. It's truly sad and disheartening.
> These companies have so much money that they can afford to do things like 10 million dollar POCs (which I've seen). Often they have literally 5+ different teams doing the same exact thing and will pick the best out of that list.
Ugh. Reading stuff like this gets me deeply sad; what could have been done with that money and time instead? It makes me want to go escape to live in the hills, maybe even a full-on Wonko the Sane.
> Ugh. Reading stuff like this gets me deeply sad; what could have been done with that money and time instead?
You're assuming that an organization can whip out the best proposal possible at a moment's notice, which is highly unlikely. What you perceive as waste is simply development costs, without which the organization could not come up with the most competitive option possible.
Complaining that having different teams working internally on a product is wasteful is just like complaining that a sports team that hiring backup players and running development league teams is wasteful.
Don't forget that capitalism (with companies), and life itself does things that way. It's not necessarily elegant (although some might say it's actually elegant), but it works.
Off on a tangent here, but I also see it in way that David Graeber describes: "the rise of the bullshit job", which in many ways makes me think about the fact that a lot of it is not far from privatized basic income.
A lot of us are being paid handsomely, but are we _really_ adding value to society by any other means that just being consumer machines?
"It works", yeah, you're right, it does what it's meant to. Unstated, behind my angst, is the question of whether what its meant to do is actually worthwhile.
> In some cases (I won't say which) they essentially launder profits through the "tech" parts of the company. They basically optimize for cheap people they bill out to the "real" company at some enormous fee.
Can you explain this differently? I don't understand how you would launder profits through yourself (or why you're laundering them at all-tax reasons?).
> Can you explain this differently? I don't understand how you would launder profits through yourself (or why you're laundering them at all-tax reasons?).
Same as licensing your name to "another" company that's actually your company, for (coincidentally I'm sure!) all of their profit, in order to shift money around.
Have umbrella company. Put your tech folks either directly in the umbrella company or in some child company. Make your other child companies (or even ones you don't have directly related to the umbrella corp) "pay" the one with the tech folks for their dev work, some arbitrary amount of money (however much you want to move). Now the umbrella company or tech child company has all the profit from your other companies, which you've done for tax or liability reasons or whatever. Mission accomplished. Whether actual tech work was done may or may not matter, depending on whether you were also trying to accomplish actual work at the same time, or just shifting money.
Basicslly how all profitable businesses work more or less. A fun game to play in order to understand the business is to figure out what they actually sell. For example a software business might sell developer's time.
Tech is an afterthought for most of these companies. Most of them are natural monopolies. Insurance for instance is a business that works such that the larger you are the lower the risk and cost. Take the ACA: many nonprofit startups tried to join the ACA marketplace to compete with the Big Boys. Essentially all failed.
These companies have so much money that they can afford to do things like 10 million dollar POCs (which I've seen). Often they have literally 5+ different teams doing the same exact thing and will pick the best out of that list.
In some cases (I won't say which) they essentially launder profits through the "tech" parts of the company. They basically optimize for cheap people they bill out to the "real" company at some enormous fee.