It's a mistake to think that corporate mediocrity follows from employee mediocrity. On the contrary, a significant amount of bad software is made to work by the efforts of a large number of rather smart people.
A more nuanced view might focus on how corporate culture, a short term focus on sales due to stock market pressures, and the inevitable lack of accountability that seems to shield the management chain from harm provided they continue to take no risks around innovation combine to create some weird effects. Look in particular at how some big software providers make acquisitions, which are then polished and re-branded as a new version solution and then shoved into a customer pipeline.
These customer pipelines are the real magic - no matter what junk gets shoved down them, nine times out of ten, junk gets paid for. Nobody on either side cares. Takes too much personal risk in the big corporate world to point out that the emperor wears no clothes.
Growing small teams of highly competent people seems to naturally lead to duplicated effort and turf wars as well. Don't think that a team of magic snowflakes will outshine all the "drips" hanging on . . . I've spent too much time in big corporate IT to not realize that most people walking the halls in these places are damn smart. They're just hamstrung by the corporate structure. But - this is why small startups have an advantage. They're not nailed down by convention.
A more nuanced view might focus on how corporate culture, a short term focus on sales due to stock market pressures, and the inevitable lack of accountability that seems to shield the management chain from harm provided they continue to take no risks around innovation combine to create some weird effects. Look in particular at how some big software providers make acquisitions, which are then polished and re-branded as a new version solution and then shoved into a customer pipeline.
These customer pipelines are the real magic - no matter what junk gets shoved down them, nine times out of ten, junk gets paid for. Nobody on either side cares. Takes too much personal risk in the big corporate world to point out that the emperor wears no clothes.
Growing small teams of highly competent people seems to naturally lead to duplicated effort and turf wars as well. Don't think that a team of magic snowflakes will outshine all the "drips" hanging on . . . I've spent too much time in big corporate IT to not realize that most people walking the halls in these places are damn smart. They're just hamstrung by the corporate structure. But - this is why small startups have an advantage. They're not nailed down by convention.