Comment by Nevermark
19 hours ago
I had long term business relationship with a company, originating and developing a product for them.
From 50 - 1000 employees things worked very well. There was a great deal of continuity in the relationship. Lots of trust and flexibility in both directions. Our product quickly became the best available, by a long margin, and for a couple decades.
But after they passed about 1500 - 2000 employees they got more organized. A formalized organization and process system. Things quickly went downhill. As someone working from outside the company, their processes were incredibly disruptive and inefficient for me. Likewise, their turnover replaced a situation of working with long time friendly colleagues, who knew me very well, to working with people who had no idea what my positive reputation was, my track record of delivering quality without the hammer of conformance, etc.
The project's ambitious upward trajectory stalled. Even then it took about ten years to fall behind other players. But it never recovered. Today it operates deep in the shadows of others.
Virtually every employee I worked with was wonderful, inclined to be as supportive as restrictions allowed, etc. But the institutionalization smothered the organizations ability to operate with any flexibility, no matter how dysfunctional or value destroying the results.
The company became like someone who has permanently lost the ability to form new memories.
You can't build anything special with someone who keeps forgetting any context. I spent many years cycling between depression and resurrected determination trying. But finally gave up.
> The company became like someone who has permanently lost the ability to form new memories.
I like this. But reality is more like companies have Alzheimer's disease. They're losing memory on top of not being able to form new ones. Slowly at first and when people notice the symptoms it's already too late.
Sorry to hear this. It's such a tricky thing for an org to balance, if not impossible.
One thing I notice is it's very easy to add additional layers of relatively small actual value that look like lots of value. So you might say you've earned a degree of respect by working consistently for years, and people don't mind that you don't always update your status reports. But then if you don't defend vigorously in the org, someone might come in who does very little work in terms of company output, but always gets your status reports in and reports up the chain so you "don't have to". And that looks like value to the person above, but it wasn't really. And now you have a new boss.
>You can't build anything special with someone who keeps forgetting any context. I spent many years cycling between depression and resurrected determination trying. But finally gave up.
Was that an LLM reference or is it the myopia in me?
There's a parallel here, either way. All the documentation in the world will not make a person, or llm session interchangable.
In some sense the new way of coding feels like building a big org with people without memory. If you can document the process perfectly, there is a holy grail out there somewhere.
Or maybe there isn't.
@throwaway13337 You plucked this out of my head. "If you can document the process perfectly, there is a holy grail out there somewhere."
└── Dey well; Be well
That company not only failed to "institutionalize" the specialized knowledge they had, once they became big enough for bureaucracy to self-assemble they ended up institutionalizing the concept of not valuing things that led to initial success.
This is correct. Senior management operated intelligently, creatively, benevolently as far as that goes, but intentionally distant. With every management layer tasked with keeping trains running on time, and not making demands on their attention.
Despite the majority of the company's early successes, which still defined the company, coming from individual creatives.
Then the whole company completely missed a major industry wave they had been perfectly built and positioned to ride. My product's last dozen+ years of struggle/stagnation, despite delivering modest progress where I still could, was not a small aspect of that epic whiff.