Comment by garciasn

Most of the world does NOT optimise for efficiency, particularly at the big end. Really big hyperscale companies (and some startups) are unusual because they at least sort of try, most of the world is not even trying.

The org structure is optimised to reduce or even minimise individual agency, explicitly at the cost of efficiency.

Teams have fiefdoms, private repos that the rest of the org can't see. You are not granted permission to see what permissions you have. Byzantine department structures. Shipping "hello world" to production takes 3-6 months and nobody can imagine it working any other way.

There's actually no central directory of teams or processes. To get anything meaningful done, you need the co-operation of maybe 8 teams but there's no consistent way to engage them all. You have to negotiate with them all in different ways, they're like little warlords, sitting and guarding access to some vital resource you need. They have established a ticket-based interface with a 7 day SLA on top of a perfectly good vending API that could do what you need in seconds. Sometimes a blocking team has a 3 month backlog so your project will just have to wait.

Everything is always in the process of being restructured, so no end to end 6 month process happens the same way every time.

These organisations could use AI to run the end to end process in minutes. Heck, they could just put APIs on top of what they already have. But the way they WANT to use it is to keep doing what they're doing but with EVEN MORE form filling and paperwork.

You would think they would get outcompeted, but no. The "IT organisation" sits like a brain slug on top of an enterprise with substantial regulatory, capital and execution moats.

Big cuts of course do happen in these places, but it's often for optics (we need to signal that we care about efficiency, and AI is a great excuse). But you can't protect yourself by being efficient and good at your job, because the cuts were not about output.

Because I don't live in a world where my team needs to grow for me to feel more successful? My teams have been small and tight-knit at every place I've been an Eng leader. I left a job with 13 engineers and they're at >90 now, apparently doing less; but, that's just what I hear second-hand.

I want to do MORE with the same amount of folks.

I think it is because programmers are not that good at economy or running a business. Their bosses are though and they don't see a productivity tool, but a way to reduce their costs.

> directly correlates to smaller team sizes, in shareholders driven economy.

Good! Costs going down is great

I have experienced directly what the evolution of cloud based software, and now AI based tooling, has done to team sizes on delivery projects.

Why would we care about team size?

Doesn't the world have many more software engineers today than at the start of the evolution of cloud based software?

What about their comment says they don’t understand that?