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Comment by ketzo | Hacker News Reader

But, like... that feels defeatist, right?

Are we saying that there have never been excellent, efficient, large organizations in the past? I feel like history tells us that, at the very least, large groups of people working in tandem have accomplished pretty amazing things.

That is, I would say, not the impression I currently have of the U.S. government; but I do think it's a little overly pessimistic to say that it couldn't get there, or get measurably better, with even a generation or two of sustained effort from really smart people. Right? I guess I don't really know.

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> Are we saying that there have never been excellent, efficient, large organizations in the past? I feel like history tells us that, at the very least, large groups of people working in tandem have accomplished pretty amazing things.

The two aren't mutually exclusive, right? Large groups of people working in tandem are accomplishing pretty amazing things, but they're not doing them in an excellent an efficient manner.

I guess that's fair.

But I have an inclination to say that for an organization to to accomplish amazing things with consistency over the kind of timespan of a government or nation, the organism has to be self-sustaining.

Part of that is the capability to attract or create talented new members of your organization, and one way of getting that done is by having a reputation for, among other things, being an excellent and efficient workplace.

I've read and heard stories of places and groups like Fairchild Semiconductor, Bell Labs, the Manhattan Project; places where smart people have gotten together to do incredible things very quickly.

The one unifying theme is that they all lasted, at their peak, essentially one or two generations at most; they couldn't grow or sustain themselves.

No, I am saying that excellence and efficiency are not required to accomplish something amazing.

NASA achieves amazing things, but it is not efficient as SpaceX has shown, But it has plenty of money, making it not necessary.

Plenty of retailers lack any semblance of excellence. But because workers are so cheap and they are efficient about their use, it does not matter.

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