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Comment by tzury | Hacker News Reader

As Chris Dixon put is:

    "A friend of mine got a job at a big company and was 
    shocked to see his colleagues worked just a few productive 
    hours a day. 

    They didn’t seem to care about their work or have relevant expertise. 
    My friend said: “Wow, this company is going under.” Then the company 
    released its quarterly reports and profits rose to an all-time high. 
    The momentum of the company’s brand and relationships was sufficient to 
    propel it forward."

http://cdixon.org/2012/05/19/the-default-state-of-a-startup-...

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Is it unusual to work only a few productive hours a day?

I was once required to log what I did during the day and it is depressing. Between the interuptions, and simply the fact that everything takes a lot longer that one estimates. I think it’s also why most timing estimates for software development are underestimated.

It isn't just relationships and momentum. XKCD had an interesting what if -- what would happen if a bowling ball was blown up to the size of Earth?[1] Turns out at that scale metal behaves like a liquid.

Work at big companies is kind of like that. Once a company gets big enough, any given person doesn't really know anything. Seemingly no one is doing anything productive -- it's meetings all the way down. But the software still gets shipped. It doesn't happen the same way it happens at a startup where someone sits down and codes a feature. It happens in a totally different way, where one hundred engineers go to meetings all day and talk to QA and analytics and bizdev, and maybe commit one line of broken code a week. It takes way more people, and the production process is totally different, and it takes way longer, but stuff still happens (often quite successfully).

[1] https://what-if.xkcd.com/46/

I read (circa 2000) that IBM's product development processes would need nine months to ship a product that was just an empty box.

That was probably referencing the story of the origin of the IBM PC. This anecdote was given as the reason they got the green light to develop the PC in Boca Raton independent of the rest of IBM.

> Turns out at that scale metal behaves like a liquid.

From xkcd:

> On that scale, the polymers in the bowling ball would behave more like a liquid

So polymers, not metal.

Then again, I've seen it repeated (though would appreciate someone backing it up with a citation) that on planetary scales, everything behaves like a high-viscosity liquid. That was in context of modeling e.g. moons hitting planets.

Isn't that part of the definition of a planet? ie. that it flows into a spherical shape?

It seems to be, yes. [0] cites IAU definition, which mentions "hydrostatic equilibrium", suggesting at this level things are viewed through the lens of fluid mechanics.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet#2006_IAU_definition_of_...

This is my experience so far, I've been waiting for this place to implode for two years. Somehow we ship enough to tick boxes in the spreadsheets, and enough that customers aren't forced to leave (although they aren't happy). It's really weird, and a hellish place to work, but they pay well.

> Seemingly no one is doing anything productive -- it's meetings all the way down.

lol please tell me you invented this

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