[nthj]

There's an episode near the end of The West Wing where it's C. J. Cregg's first day as Chief of Staff. Of course, this same day, a national security emergency has arisen involving weapons-grade plutonium. The whole day goes by, with C. J. increasingly frustrated as the Secretaries of Defense, State, and Energy all pass the buck on the crisis.

The President is able to nudge C. J. to put together a tiger team. With a few words, he has resolved the crisis.

Until I saw this, I never understood corporate structures. Why are reporting lines structured so customers can languish until the CEO barks an order to address? But during a normal day-to-day, the top executive needs stability. Anyone incentivized and empowered to single-handedly address problems is also-by definition-someone who wields immense political power. So departments are set up. The implicit standing order is "maintain stability." And whenever process actually needs to change, the top executive routes around the communication chains he has established.

[perlgeek]

There are other reasons.

For example, when I started my current job about 10 years ago, the company had around 115 employees, and me and my three colleagues were THE software development team at the company. You need some kind of automation? You went to us. Oh, and we also built the internal CMDB and all the tooling

Now, there are 450+ employees, my team has ~8 developers, and there are more development teams, with different purposes and scopes.

Colleagues still come to us when they have development needs, and quite often we have to tell them "that's out of scope of what we do these days" (and hopefully point them somewhere else who can help them). Not because we don't want to be helpful, but because we're already overrun with work that's very clearly in scope for us, and that our department lead prioritized for us.

What does that have to do with support? It creates incentives to say "not our job". Back in the days, if a customer had a tricky problem, support might involve us in the solution. Now, we have to decline unless it's likely a problem with our corner of the software. Which means support staff has to chase for other responsible engineers / experts.

So the small company from 10 years probably had much better support experience, at least in cases where support cases couldn't be resolved by first-level support.

There are more reasons: our whole software landscape was much smaller, so an average support person could be familiar with a larger part of it.

You don't need intentional design for stability to create a maze that support has to traverse.

[somenameforme]

Because many, and arguably most, corporations have grown too large to be sustainable owing to overly aggressive adoption of digital technologies paired alongside generous investment and financial policy that has assumed infinite growth (fueled by infinite consumption) as the goal, which is breaking down only so absurdly because we went from "We have branches in 3 different cities!" to "I have a business with a 1/3rd of the human species as my customers. Neato." rather too quickly.

In less wordy words: Imagine you have 1 million customers. And 95% are satisfied per year. And 90% of those unsatisfied customers are able to be satisfied through the regular channels. These numbers don't seem awful, but at scale everything breaks. That's a total of 50,000 unsatisfied customers per year and 5,000 who are unable to achieve a satisfactory outcome through the regular channels.

And that's with only with 1 million customers - practically a mom 'n pop shop by the modern mantra of growth at literally any cost. Consequently, you end up with a large number of customers who have irreconciled issues when going through the normal channels, unless you approach 100% effectiveness which will never happen - as peak possible customer satisfaction is only going to decrease in proportion to scale.

So you end up in a scenario where accepting an increasingly large number of discontented customers just becomes a normal part of business at scale. But of course this will also lead to the downfall of those accepting this. Because customers, and citizens, once slighted - tend to remember it.

[Waterluvian]

I think:

There is a point in every company’s growth where employees stop caring about the product or the company and only care about the mini game of staying employed and meeting KPIs while combating every other team wanting your team to be the one that has to work extra hours.