Why do big companies suck so badly?
I find working for bigger companies painful, and this is my main motivation for venturing out on my own. If I try to be objective as to why I find it so painful, I don't think it's due to people being evil or stupid; best explanation I have is that it seems to stem from the mix of coercion and boredom involved in synchronising efforts of larger groups of humans.
Are there any good books or other research into this? I'd really like to better understand why so that I don't replicate these things in my own company.
Mostly because big companies mainly focus on the interest of stakeholders above all else.
This is an old article, but still holds up!
https://medium.com/creatorspad/9-reasons-why-corporations-suck-at-internal-innovation-and-how-they-can-improve-f6b6341ef85c
My co-founder and I both left a big company to start https://www.uclusion.com because big companies are frequently painful and we wanted to make life easier for developers.
My reading list on the causes:
https://www.amazon.com/Build-Better-Products-Successful-User-Centered/dp/1933820586 - building decent products is a lot harder than people realize
https://www.amazon.com/Technology-Trap-Capital-Labor-Automation-ebook/dp/B07M8YV8PF - barriers to the adoption of new technology are higher than people realize
https://www.amazon.com/David-Graeber-ebook/dp/B075RWG7YM - many jobs will not produce anything useful no matter how well people do them
https://www.amazon.com/Why-Nations-Fail-Origins-Prosperity-ebook/dp/B0058Z4NR8 - much harder to prevent abuse of power than is obvious
But going back to plugging the Uclusion product we believe that synchronizing the efforts of humans is certainly a major cause and so we built a product to try to address that at a team level.
Big companies over-engineer the shit out of everything.
Conversely startups provide minimum viable solution to the problem.
Polar opposites. Took me a long time to figure it out.
Because the bigger the company, the higher the specialization of its employees.
The higher the specialization of its employees, the more routine, mundane, and repetitive the tasks are.
Have you ever seen Office Space (1999), directed by Mike Judge? :)
All I have to say about this is small companies are equally sucky a lot of times and the reason I decided to go indie.
Peterson has a few things about it like
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0Y6r4pNzN8