I think that it's really interesting that all companies that experience explosive growth, harp about their mantra to "keep the startup environment", but 99% of them fail, because they eventually give power to the management and not the engineers.
It's a false dichotomy. Engineers are people that do engineering work. Managers are people that manage projects and people. Even if you're from an engineering background (like a lot of the senior managers at Google) once you start managing people, you're a manager. It's not a matter of giving power to "the management," it's that by definition managers are the people that have power.
It's the engineers that generally come up with solutions, which management can't see or does not deem important because they are generally too far removed from the problem. Which is why having managers wield what gets done and what does not leads companies to operate in a very non-startup way regardless of how hard they try to avoid the inevitable.
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I think that it's really interesting that all companies that experience explosive growth, harp about their mantra to "keep the startup environment", but 99% of them fail, because they eventually give power to the management and not the engineers.
It's a false dichotomy. Engineers are people that do engineering work. Managers are people that manage projects and people. Even if you're from an engineering background (like a lot of the senior managers at Google) once you start managing people, you're a manager. It's not a matter of giving power to "the management," it's that by definition managers are the people that have power.
It's the engineers that generally come up with solutions, which management can't see or does not deem important because they are generally too far removed from the problem. Which is why having managers wield what gets done and what does not leads companies to operate in a very non-startup way regardless of how hard they try to avoid the inevitable.
Engineers ideas are not necessarily ranked by business value when you have more than just a few customers.