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What you say is my experience as well, with one caveat: the large corporation is usually much less productive then the smallish team that actually able to "just do [thing]".

It's just that it's impossible to scale that approach, so the larger the enterprise gets, the less you'll actually be shipping... As pretty much all of them seem to think it's easy to scale development teams, increasing their headcount and running productivity against a wall.

A small team has barely any space for Juniors however, so I think it's very good that both approaches exist in the wild

Agree. My team is small, but everyone has 10+ years of experience. We can get a lot of research prototypes churned out quickly.

But then for the deployment and maintenance, they hired a large army of cheap inexperienced junior developers.

>However they are not party to some decision loops and are often on the receiving end of architecture and design decisions. Most of them start to complain about that sooner or later, so I ask them to start participating in more meetings...

And if they decided to attend these meetings are they still expected to maintain the same "velocity/story points/etc."? Because if so then they will likely have to work outside of "office hours" to actually get the work done. Possibly why they decline and stop complaining... They realize they'll just get handed a bigger bag of BS.

And then they become disengaged. And then when they never get raises beyond 2-3% do you wonder why they jump ship and change companies too?

Your argument is that some meetings are necessary to make decisions. That is not what the OP is tired of. He is tired of 'corporate bs'. Productive meetings are not 'corporate bs' so your comment is not relevant.

How do you define corporate bs Vs productive meetings?

It's pretty easy to tell them apart. For example: a meeting where devs discuss and agree something and maybe make a principle going forward vs a meeting where nobody is empowered to make any decisions, there is dependency on people not in the meeting, nothing is decided, next action is to follow up with someone not in the meeting and to book in another meeting.

Not quite... my argument is that a lot of meetings are necessary to keep an organization ticking - decision making is just a part of it. If for anyone that feels like corporate bs (which is a perfectly valid standpoint!!!), well... these people aren't cut for a corporate life. What's the problem in that? If I don't like children I probably wouldn't try to become a kindergarten teacher, if I absolutely can't stand communication and politics, I shouldn't work in a corporate setting.

And it's also perfectly OK to find this out about yourself only later in life, when you have gathered some (more) professional experience.

What's not OK imho is labelling other people's version of work as "corporate bs".

> If for anyone that feels like corporate bs (which is a perfectly valid standpoint!!!), well... these people aren't cut for a corporate life.

If someone feels like a meeting is "corporate bs", that speaks to a failing of those hosting the meeting to properly communicate the intent of the meeting. If you are not able to effectively communicate with the people you work with, perhaps it is you who isn't cut out for corporate life? If you think you can treat a class of kindergarteners like it is a fourth year university course, teaching kindergarten likely isn't for you.

Peter principle applies, I suppose.

Agreed! It is of course not always the employee's fault for not "liking" meetings. Pretty often meetings are not well prepared (by the one who called for the meeting in the first place), not well moderated (if any kind of moderation is there at all) and there is little consideration if everyone on the invitee is really relevant or not. And some people are just not good at explaining stuff and communicating intent, as you said. These are all facts and I can't deny them. I am very often guilty of all of these mistakes myself. As is most probably everyone who has ever organised a meeting.

It takes effort to mitigate all that and it takes even more effort to try to work around it if it happens a lot. If you are ready and willing to improve the system - welcome to management ;) If this feels like a whole lot of crap to you - better stay away from big companies, do some consulting, find startups with like minded people... Staying on a job, being unmotivated or stressed out is not good for anyone involved.

Can you give an example of a meeting that keeps the org ticking and doesn't have any decision making?

To your second point.. corporate bs is not necessary and should be called out. Most of it falls into waste. Another large chunk falls into people trying to climb the corporate ladder.

> The latter is perfectly fine for me as I am aware that these people still produce huge amounts of value to the company

This is the problem. Most managers are not aware of the real ground situation and rely on “visibility” presentations to judge worth.

You are right. It is what it is due to complex systems... The thing is that neither the holes diggger nor the holes manager find happiness doing this.

Thanks for the satire. It's very good. Sounds almost as if you believe it!

never seen "zounds" used as a unit of measure like that but I can't pass up an opportunity to share the trivia that it's a contraction of "god's wounds"

> large business organizations are complex social structures. You can't have a complex social structure without a lot of communication going on.

The question is if this is required. Personally i can't wait for AI managers who are optimizing transparent objectives

> AI managers who are optimizing transparent objectives

All AIs that I've seen so far just optimize the reproduction of existing biases and/or serve to obfuscate policy decisions by ensuring that no person is left to blame. Are you stating a dream there, or did I miss a development towards practical AI systems that make decisions more transparent?

NNs dont need to be transparent as long as the objectives are transparent

And the training data right? How can you prevent exactly what the person you replied to is talking about. Situations where we ingrain the horrible nature of humankind because that's what we're training the AI on. Say you were building a credit score classifier NN. It's going to "learn" that African Americans have lower credit scores. Mostly because it's going to be trained on historic data, which is based on human input, and humans are inherently racist in some fashion or another. And societal constructs have prevented African Americans from economic advancement since... ever.

You can't just have "transparent objectives" and let AI take the wheel.

What you have now with organic matter AI is less transparent

Where's the "A" in that? Are you making an argument for a universal creator?

It says here the objective is "to serve man."

*hole

(Good comment, though ;)

thanks for noticing, fixed!