Comment by rybosworld
4 months ago
Bureaucrat-ification isn't a phenomenon unique to Google - it happens at every company eventually.
It's really hard to describe why it's inevitable (there are a lot of factors).
But it's self-evident really. All of the major tech players started with a single innovation that afforded them enough revenue to acquire almost everything else in their portfolio.
Aside from search, the only major product Alphabet built-in house that meaningfully moves the needle revenue-wise is their cloud segment. Youtube was acquired - and it's effectively an extension of search.
Meta had to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp. Without those acquisitions, I have strong doubts they'd still be a major player today.
You can run through this exercise with Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, NVDA etc.
The common theme is they did 1 or 2 things really well, and got big enough to acquire/copy/bully smaller players out of the market.
What's crazy is most of them still rely on that one original thing they did well for >50% of revenue.
> It's really hard to describe why it's inevitable (there are a lot of factors).
I think there's a lot of small factors, but of those the biggest on (IMO) is the fallacy that throwing people at a problem gets it done faster. For some situations: yes, for all situations: no. And you need experience or some kind of sharp intuition to know when to expand and when not to expand.
Add more and more people to a job and they'll find ways to justify their value at the expense of efficiency. And there's a snowball effect from there as an org adds people who believe adding people is always good.
Then the corpo runs into layoffs and everyone throws their hands up and says "How could we have avoided this?" By not overhiring in the first place.
(All IMO naturally.)