Why is everything so hard in a large organization?
It seems like a lot of people here have been in an ineffective large organisation and an effective startup. I&#x27;ve worked at an <i>effective</i> large organisation and an <i>ineffective</i> startup, so perhaps I can shed some light on what these kind of processes are for:<p>* You don&#x27;t get to be a large organisation without accumulating generations of previous products. Well, unless you&#x27;re google and can regularly fire your customers without going bust. but part from them, you start to need processes just to track what&#x27;s going on. (The  ineffective startup accumulated previous product attempts too, and is still paying  for a lot of pointless infra because no-one still there knows which ones can be switched off).<p>* At a large scale, it starts to be pretty difficult to maneuver if each dept of 30-50 people has built or contracted all their own infra &amp; services. Some divergence is useful for agility, but a lot of it is just waste and actually slows you down when you want two depts to work together on something - or even prevents useful collaboration. An effective organisation will make the tradeoff consciously.<p>* When you complete dozens of projects per year, it starts to be possible to invest in researching and rolling out best practices in areas where a startup just has to go with the simple&#x2F;obvious answer.  When my startup employer moved, it was pretty onerous, and there was a bunch of stuff we never found again. The large org had so many offices that it had a full time dept just for moving offices. (They weren&#x27;t dumb, each move consolidated offices -but they kept buying other companies). When they moved us, it was like magic - we went home on a friday and went to work on a monday in the new office, and everything was set up. Well, we had to set up the lab ourselves, but