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Comment by lsllc | Hacker News Reader

This is a big company problem. When companies grow, they eschew the folks who helped build it from the ground up and are intimately familiar with the business, products and customers in favor of people who have "worked at big companies". But in most cases, they didn't actually build them. So all they have to offer is the "big company baggage" that they were exposed to previously.

You can imagine how it usually works out ... after a few years of zero or negative progress, they'll move on to somewhere else, claiming victory on their LinkedIn profiles. Meanwhile the employees who actually built the company continue to get passed over in favor of another round of impostors.

So actually, staying at the same company for a long time probably means you're trapped by a glass ceiling and not promoted very far as you'll "never have had the big company experience that we need". Meanwhile, the company starts to stagnate.

/rant

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“Big Company Experience” is a fucking plague. Smaller companies hire from them thinking they will bring magic sauce but all they bring is toxicity and political baggage. Meanwhile the people who went against all odds to get the company to where it is are pushed out, because “they’re not the right fit for this scale”. Nobody who says this ever talks about growing people into those roles.

See also: the last ten years of AR/VR at Meta.

Big Company Experience means you can thrive Roman style bureaucratic power plays, not actually build things. It does take a different kind of person to bootstrap something out of a garage into a company, and then continue that fledgling company to the next phase, but instead of going BCE, they should be tapping back into the Founder Energy, not the BCE people.

I'm not a Big Company person or a Founder. From my perspective, it's the "continue to the next phase" that is the whole problem.

Not everything needs to be expanded to it's logical extreme. I've worked in a lot of places, and the ideal employer is probably one who is in the middle, and planning on staying there.

The concept of "grow until you've eaten everybody" is sickening, and tiring. Especially for your non-C-suite employees who don't give a fuck about the logo on their shirt. I'm talking of course about most people the second they are no longer within earshot of their boss.

That "momentum, oomph, pizzazz" is not normal all the time. In the words of Mark Meadows, "if everything is sacred; then nothing is sacred." Meaning if you don't prioritize what is truly important, and simply assume that everything is of equally critical importance, then chances are you will fail at many more things than if you focused on the one most important thing.

But companies don't think that way. They see missed anything as missed opportunity. That is rarely the case.

Here's an example; Imagine a machine shop that has 10 customers and 65% on-time delivery. The top 3 customers drive 75% of the businesses revenue. Now lets assume that they are in negotiations with a potential 11th customer who will be their new 5th largest customer.

The cut-throat capitalist would pull all their strings to get this customer. And then the rest of the customers will notice that their 65% on time delivery decreases to 55% as a result. Now the 3rd largest customer is quoting their parts elsewhere because they need a second supplier to cover how unreliable your deliveries are.

Do you believe that had the business not taken on the additional customer that they would have "missed a revenue opportunity"? Is that big picture stuff, small picture stuff, or just humans who live in a real world stuff?

It's because almost universally, people almost always want more money.

We should be creating environments where money isn't the largest axis. I'd like more time.

Time and money are interchangeable.

Exchangeable but not interchangeable, the conversion ratios are all wrong now. Even in the early 90s, you could have a part time job and not live with roomates. This is no longer possible even for many people making "good money".

In how I view my relationships with customers, I wouldn't want to sacrifice my relationship with customer 3 to get customer 5. My main concern would be in building a stable resilient org, not in growth unless we had a reason for growth.

I understand where you are coming from, but the archetypes I am describing are just as valid for non-profits. The scrappy person who starts something is different than the person that creates a functioning long term org with structure and delegation. The person who is good at launching from zero has a different set of skills than the person to who takes something that has launched into something that is sustainable.

I am not talking about the growth at all costs mindset. I think we agree, it is the growth at all costs mindset that replaces that builder to creates that stable org with a carpet bagger that has BCE that claims they are going to build the business 2x or more but all they bring in is politics. These are the snake oil salesmen that fail up.

If an org needs to be revitalized, rather than bringing in BCE, they should go back and bring in Founder Energy.

> The cut-throat capitalist would pull all their strings to get this customer.

This is an oversimplification. People specialize. There are people in Sales roles, and people in Operations roles. Yes, I absolutely expect the people in Sales roles to pull all their strings to get this customer. Their compensation (including commission) also incentivizes them in that direction. Naturally, closing the sale makes the company look better to its Board and shareholders.

The question is, who is the incompetent guy in Operations who is struggling with 65% on-time delivery? Maybe he's not executing well, maybe he needs to be replaced, especially if OTD slips to 55% and is turning into the weak link in the chain. And where is the executive who is supposed to be overseeing all this, to invest in and buff up Operations so that it will match the momentum of the rest of the company?

I’m not sure if you intended BCE people to have a dual meaning there, but if you did, well played. That’s a term I wouldn’t mind using.

Are they looking for magic sauce?

Or are they looking for someone who can navigate the legality of extending the American stock option scheme to the new office in El Salvador?

Maybe they want someone who knows how to implement a proper system of financial controls, which they've realised they need after a guy brought himself a canoe with the company's credit card?

I can see a founder wanting to hire people to take care of the growing compliance workload that comes with a growing company.

Buying a canoe with the company credit card is peanuts vs the waste of something like a multi-year ‘AI’ project which delivers zero useful results.

Maybe they should have kept the canoe guy instead of hiring grown up bean-counters who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

I read a very interesting theory in a great book called the Sovereign Individual.

The optimum firm size will go down as the cost of communications goes down. Back when messages had to be delivered on horseback, you wanted all your people in one office building.

But now you can send an email in 10 seconds for $0, so it becomes practical to have many spread-out firms cooperating.

Obviously this is not the only factor, but still.

There's another interesting idea in Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind: when many agents with approximately the same processing power cooperate, the higher-level agents must necessarily be out of touch with the details, and will make big policy decisions that look stupid to many of the lower-level agents who have more of the details but less of the big picture. His agents were all part of the same mind, but it seems eerily similar to politics and big-company management.

So maybe startups should try to hire people with startup experience from the same industry since big-picture politicking is less valuable to a startup.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socially_optimal_firm_size

>> So actually, staying at the same company for a long time probably means you're trapped by a glass ceiling and not promoted

Some anecdotal evidence I've seen of this.

I worked at a large publishing company. One of the VP's had been there some ten years. Seven of those as the second in command as the senior VP. Three different times, they hired an outside CEO, passing him over and each time the CEO left after less than two years, they didn't even consider him. He's still there and its clear they have no desire to promote him to CEO. Even knowing this, he continues to stay there which also has a down stream effect where nobody below will be promoted into his position or a parallel VP position, so by him staying? It just stagnates everything below him. Managers leave because they know there's nowhere to go but laterally or out of the company.

More recently, I worked at a huge health care company. One of the senior directors recruited me to join a new AI team he was standing up to do various projects with some emerging AI tools. I felt honored he would seek me out. Turns out, this was his gamble to get promoted into a VP position that he had coveted since being a director for the last five years. Our team kicked ass for about a year, but apparently, it wasn't enough. During our afternoon team meeting, he just announced out of the blue that Friday (it was Wednesday) would be his last day and our manager would be taking over the team after he left. He pulled me into his office a few hours later and explained what had happened. He said his boss (a VP) had told him last month that no matter what our team accomplished, he wouldn't be getting his VP spot at this company. If he really wanted to be a VP, he would have to leave the company since herself and several other VP's, didn't see him as "VP material" which is crazy if you knew what the guy did in his tenure at the company. Unironically, he joined an AI startup as one of two of their VP's. He was there for three years and they got acquired for $300M of which he got a good chunk of.

> "When companies grow, they eschew the folks who helped build it from the ground up and are intimately familiar with the business, products and customers in favor of people who have 'worked at big companies'."

Microsoft's revitalization occurred only after Steve Ballmer was ousted and Satya Nadella pushed out much of the old guard who were set in their ways.

Satya had been at the company for quite a while himself. Perhaps not as long as others, but he was a well known veteran within the company

Disagree. This is a founder problem. Once founders go away, you are left with the MBAs and characters that are fit for business, but lack the umph you are describing.

Yeah, agree with your take. I think it's especially odd to describe Apple as suffering from this "big company problem" given that it seems like the execs there have tenures much longer than the norm. Cook has been at Apple since 1998, shortly after Jobs' return. Federighi originally worked at NeXT when it was acquired by Apple. Eddy Cue has been at Apple since 1989 and his Wikipedia page says he was instrumental in creating Apple's online store in '98.

Sure, Jobs was such a unique visionary and it was inevitable that things would change after his death, but I still find folks tend to minimize his missteps (the Cube, antenna-gate), while somehow shitting on Cook despite Cook managing the giant ship that is Apple extremely well for nearly 15 years.

Cook has been exceptional for the stock. But we would likely all agree that on the product end (take Siri for example), it is absolutely clear he and the leadership do not use the product. If they did, I do not believe they would be ok with it being horrendous for over 10 years. Also Apple has had a lot of mishaps under Cook (the wireless Air charger that never got made, butterfly keyboards, Vision Pro, Siri, an OS that is riddled with bugs, iPhone battery slowdown, touchbar on a pro device). I might be missing a few, but he is very clearly not a product guy

Also curious to have chosen John Giannandrea who was behind the failure of Google Assistant and from the era where Google was late in AI, to repeat the same failure with Siri

>it is absolutely clear he and the leadership do not use the product. If they did

I am absolutely sure they do. The problem is taste. And they are as you said not product people. A high bar for quality expectation. If we remember 50% of people cant taste the difference between Coca Cola and Pepsi, while some others could taste which Coca Cola they were manufactured.

And that is what Steve has been saying, you need to care about the product way beyond normal people do. And have the energy to try and push things forward.

The expectation are exceptionally high because we compared it to Steve Jobs era. But even if we lower the standard modern Apple is still not good enough as it is.

To quote Steve Jobs. Stop chasing the bottle line which is what Tim Cook is doing, and start making sure your Top line is done correctly.

Seems more like a political problem. Once a founder leaves, the leadership team no longer has a mandate. Things that were once "my way or get fucking lost" become "I need to justify this decision with the Board, McKinsey, Blackrock, etc".

Under these parameters, hiring the failson, yale graduate, CEO of TooBigToFail Inc. to be VP of Operations, is much easier than promoting the guy who worked at the company for 200 years and knows every employee by name, but instead went to San Jose State.

Very much agree. The Wikipedia page on Forstall says as much:

> Steve Jobs was referred to as the "decider" who had the final say on products and features while he was CEO, reportedly keeping the "strong personalities at Apple in check by always casting the winning vote or by having the last word", so after Jobs' death many of these executive conflicts became public. Forstall had such a poor relationship with Ive and Mansfield that he could not be in a meeting with them unless Cook mediated; reportedly, Forstall and Ive did not cooperate at any level.

> After Jobs' death in 2011, it had been reported that Forstall was trying to gather power to challenge Cook.

If I had a nickel for every time someone complains about Apple's monopolistic bullshit with the equivalent of "Steve Jobs would have never done this", I'd buy out enough Apple stock to impose myself as the CEO and demand they allow root access on iPads.

Jobs had failures but he made up for them with huge success. It's about the average; you can't get everything right all the time but if you manage to correct the course properly it's all good.

You are giving Cook way too much credit. The only thing he did was enrich Apple even more. Pretty much everything Apple has done is a continuation of what existed before or some side project pushed by another exec at Apple. The only thing he pushed for personally is a failure (Vision Pro, its technologically good but that's irrelevant) when it was clear that this is not a product that can be very successful or useful at any price (his arrogance is so big that he somehow thought Meta was just not good, and it's not fundamentally of problem of having nice use cases).

Cook has managed to not destroy or waste Jobs legacy but that's the best thing you can say about him. I don't think just making money is a worthwhile objective for a company, otherwise might as well just do finance, less moving parts, easier profits.

Every company was founded by someone and yeah they do go away at some point; for a more recent company as it grows, the founders often get more and more disconnected from the core mission of the company (at least no longer hands-on). Meanwhile they have the B.o.D. whispering in their ears (in parseltongue!) " ....ssss.... you need to hire some big company people to run this businessssss..."

This really eloquently summarizes my experiences working at a “rocketship startup” that tried this - went from a team of 500 shipping like a team of 50 to a team of 1,000 shipping like a team of 50,000.

Suits. MBAs.

Inb4 someone complains that they're an MBA and not so bad. I'm talking about the guys that don't know or care about tech at all. The guys that just wanna be a big executive like they saw on TV.

The same sorta people that were in my 101s at uni who "heard programming was a good job" but didn't otherwise have any interest in tech

One thing to note about "big companies" is that everyone involved at the upper levels are rich enough to engage in recreational lawsuits. So if you say anything true about their performance, you get hit with a defamation lawsuit, possibly in a speech-hostile venue like England. The end result is a conspiracy where it's in everyone's best interest to lie about their peer's performance.

These are "APE[0] hires". Their goal is not to build a better company, their goal is to trade favors and power around a select set of elites brought together by a mutual hatred of the rest of us. You hire an APE for the same reason why royal families used to marry their daughters off - it's a way to trade power. "Worked at big companies" is a code-word for "has enough clout to play with the other lizard people in the room".

[0] Assimilation, Poverty & Exclusion; the opposite of a "DEI hire"

Do you have any examples of defamation lawsuits? I've sold two companies, and have plenty of rich and upper-level exec friends, and I have never heard of a defamation lawsuit amongst tech execs.

There is definitely a stupid game where people don't tell it like it is, but in my experience it's because people don't want to deal with HR at all, and so don't do or say anything that might bring a tut-tut from HR. Because people in HR are beyond annoying...

And HR fears a wrongful-termination lawsuit, not a defamation lawsuit.

This is all in the US, though. The UK has quite different libel laws and so maybe lawsuits are more common there.

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