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Comment by pembrook | Hacker News Reader

This is absolutely true.

However, I would argue that the level of skill of any individual employee is made irrelevant inside big companies.

If Google pays 3X salary to get the best designer in the industry, it's completely wasted, because this person will be hamstrung by the much more powerful forces of bureaucracy and design debt.

If you place that same person high enough up in the org chart that they have power to make decisions...then they can't design anything amazing because they're just another manager attending meetings all day and not designing.

It's a catch-22. Hence why companies commoditize labor into pay bands.

You might as well just hire modestly above-average people at modestly above-average salaries who are easy-going and get along with their peers without drama. This is basically what most company interview processes are optimized for.

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Maybe you shouldn't focus on getting 'the best person' on the correct place, but try to make 'the best process' for evaluating and improving UI/UX and mandate it's followed everywhere. One of the projects at my workplace decided to document every design decision from all viewpoints including the final decision made. Seemed to help a lot against people arguing in circles and/or bikeshedding.

And that way lies large corporate Agile. All work becomes crap, because you can no longer tell the difference between good people encumbered by bureacracy and crap people using the bureaucracy as an excuse.

My experience is to manage people effectively, and apply just enough process for each person and job.

Process works though, because not everyone on your team is going to be an "A" student, and if you have 500 employees, you simply don't have the time and bandwidth to make a custom process for each person. There's wide ranges of ability at every company, even prestigious FAANGs and investment banks and pretty much everywhere. The great benefit of layering on heavy process and bureaucracy is that you can get homogenized, reliable, reasonable-quality, but not consistently outstanding, output from the A, B, C, and D players, without terrible risk that someone who doesn't know what they are doing (who every company has) fucks everything up. As the saying goes, every process you encounter is scar tissue from a past fuck-up. What you sacrifice with all this bureaucracy is the absolutely brilliant output you could be getting from the A players, but the cost is usually worth mitigating the risk of disaster.

You're absolutely right, and that's the reason large companies end up being so inefficient.

Eventually, some nimble whippersnapping startup who only hires "A players" eats the large enterprise's breakfast. But to satisfy the shareholders, the startup takes on more work and to cope with that work, they start hiring B players... and so it goes on the enterprise merrygoround.

There's no real solution, just different ways of playing the game.

You’re absolutely right. Steve Jobs warned about process and process people as well and it’s not surprising.

Intereting talk :- ) "Steve Jobs: Content vs Process", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4dCJJFuMsE 3 minutes.

I'd guess that it'd work better with a better-than-good-enough Benevolent Dictator who gets to improve the user interface however s/he wants,

than to go looking for the "magic" UX improvement process

That’s the SJ interview I was thinking about…

Jeff Bezos as well:

>As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2.

A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. Gulp. It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, “Well, we followed the process.” A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process. The process is not the thing.

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/2016-letter-to...

> My experience is to manage people effectively, and apply just enough process for each person and job.

Sounds like you have a decent lightweight process-making-and-revising process. Most organizations don't. Instead, most organizations create processes mostly ad-hoc in reaction to some trauma, and then never remove them. It accumulates, like scar tissue that only ever gets thicker unless it is ripped away, which just causes different scars.

“The best process” makes it sound more mechanical than you probably intend. I think you mean: “focus on propagating tools and habits which raise the quality of design conversations”

> mandate

The problem with mandatory processes is that people don’t take responsibility for the outcome of a process over which they have no power. Processes should be tools people can pick up to improve clarity.

I have worked in several, non-FAANG, but rich and successful large companies. I think you are spot-on.

I wish HN had a 'follow' feature...

Anyway, thanks for your quality comments.

https://hnrss.org/user?id=pembrook

Oh my, what have you done.

Follow and Reply Received are the only two social features I would like to see officially implemented.

Then HN would be a proper social media site, and by tradition we'd all have to start saying how awful it is, and endlessly post links to articles about us quitting it. /s

dang maintains a separate notification system for HN. It's been around for a long time, but not many people seem to know about it (only 2137 people are subscribed).

http://www.hnreplies.com/

In the small group inside the large FAANG-adjacent company where I work we test designs pretty thoroughly with users to settle these kinds of debates/decisions. Surely we're not the only ones.

Many companies I am familiar with are "agile" in the sense that they work on a new chunk of the waterfall every two weeks; or just justify having NFI what they are doing on the business side by just slow dripping requirements over how much time/money they have.

Arguments over features basically yield to whoever has the most soft power, which is they you see the C suite so invested in the outcome of various features... it's literally theirs.

> If Google pays 3X salary to get the best designer in the industry, it's completely wasted

Not completely wasted. At least they made sure the best designer is not working for a possible competitor.

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