[twblalock]

> It seems the bigger a company gets the more they favor predictability over excellence.

That's also what their customers tend to prefer -- they are often large companies themselves, and they can't drop everything to deal with a breaking change introduced by a vendor. They expect stuff that works to continue to work, and they expect breaking changes to be communicated far in advance so they can make plans to deal with them. That's part of what they are paying for.

What you see as mediocrity is a feature of big companies, not a bug. You can't make all the decisions in a project yourself and expect all of the affected stakeholders and customers to go along with it. Their concerns are often valid and need to be addressed because the project has an impact on the business that other teams don't know about.

Star developers at large companies are the ones who build and manage relationships effectively, so they can deliver on projects that have a big impact on the bottom line, and also do high-quality programming work. If you can do this, you can achieve a lot more with the resources of a large company than you could at a small one.

[mattmanser]

I think this is only partially true. For example my client just added a huge chunk of functionality which is generating a lot of interest and will definitely lead to some nice sales.

Took me 2 months solo developing it. I basically looked at the competition, picked out the key features and made it, with little direction. I only really discussed what we should leave out due to cost/benefit ratio with the CEO, and it was usually him just agreeing.

I know of another larger company that could have made exactly the same functionality, but would talk about a team of 5 taking 2 years to do the same thing. Admittedly I have analyst skills as well as Dev skills and lots of experience, but that's still crazy to me.

That's not mediocrity winning for customer stability, that's being unable to react to the market.

Larger companies are realising this is a huge weakness and I've seen stories here of them setting up mini-teams given huge leeway to get stuff done.

Also look at gov.uk and the American equivalent that are transforming what were terrible portals with small nimble teams.

[fleitz]

Nah, it's just that large companies have a lot of smaller companies inside it losing money.

Without the safety net of the larger company these companies would go bankrupt in the real world and not exist.

Star developers mostly have figured out which teams are / are not going bankrupt and direct their internal business to those teams / figure out how to couch a problem in terms that make it seem like it should be given to a team not going bankrupt.

eg. If your web team is shit, but app team is rock stars then the UI should be an app, to prevent the web team from getting the job add a feature such as something with the camera/gps that makes it feel app ish.