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'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't get to be a large organisation without accumulating generations of previous products. Well, unless you're google and can regularly fire your customers without going bust. but part from them, you start to need processes just to track what'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 & 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/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'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