Comment by runako
3 months ago
I'm convinced a lot of people who espouse this view have never worked at any large[1] private sector organization. My last stint working at a big company included seeing people routinely taking naps at work and generally behaving in the ways people associate with government employees. Smaller organizations are more efficient, but are limited in possible scope of impact.
[1] "large" here generally meaning over 100k employees, relatively concentrated (so a hypothetical org with 5k employees in each of 20 countries likely does not fit). For scale, the US has any number of domestic bases where personnel count exceeds Meta's total staffing, with a couple being roughly the size as Microsoft's US employment.
That matches my experience, too. I’ve worked in .com, .edu, and .gov and people are the same everywhere. The main thing I notice is that there tends to be a lot of selection bias when people talk about the private sector where the most successful companies are used to represent the whole concept, when almost everyone has had to interact with, say, a cable or health insurance company (my local DMV is sooo much better than Comcast).