Actually there was a paragraph about this in the essay that I cut:
The Nile Perch quality of disputes may help explain why large
organizations are so unproductive. The size of large organizations
insulates them from the forces that keep smaller ones in line.
Questions tend to be decided instead by political battles, and such
disputes have a terrible cost because they push other ideas out of
all the participants' heads. Politics is like an infectious disease,
because political schemers suck up not just their own attention,
but also that of all the people in their way, who might otherwise
have been thinking about other things.
What a great time for me to read this essay and in particular this part you left out.
My small team operates as a startup inside of a large company. We have produced more software at a faster pace than any other group in the company. We had a conf call today with the powers that be who have decided they want more process.
Why would they do this? Well, while other groups are sitting around talking about resource this and ticket that we have simply been churning out software that meets the operational needs. The problem is that by doing this we are stepping on all sorts of political toes..."why did your team do this it's not your area?"
Sigh, I guess it's time to move on so I can get my mindset back to solving problems with software.
It sounds like they want to control something that works so they can claim credit, or at least reap the rewards. I went through this a couple years ago. It's painful.
I worked on a system that we had deployed and that was working. A competing group, highly process oriented, who were was still generating requirements paperwork, but not a single line of code. Their objective was to take over our project. They played mean politics. Eventually they took charge.
Yeah, taking credit is definitely a big part of it, but it's more than that. By simply doing what we do we keep making other groups in the company look horrible. I don't think we're all-stars, but in big corporations it seems that just doing your job with a results minded attitude easily sets you above the rest.
Also, don't think we anti-process :) I'm a stickler for SCM and testing, but we operate in an agile manner. Most projects start out with a 'hey, this would be cool' and then we iterate based on user feedback. Early on code changes can roll out daily, while the new process wants us to bundle our code and hand it to a 'deployment team' who might take 2 weeks to get around to deploying. How this is acceptable is beyond my comprehension, but it might explain why other groups never seem to deliver anything (or put 6 months on any timeline).
I told my boss today that if this goes through that it will likely destroy what makes us so successful and he agreed. I'll just look at it as motivation to work harder on my own ideas and maybe once and for all escape ;)
I would suggest that the same people drawn into big companies are the same people drawn to working for the governments. Because they have job safety, are not pushed to hard, have a rigid work boundaries, and can play the politics game.
