[AlotOfReading]

In a prior life I was an archaeologist and would visit these amazing structures, built by literal dozens of people working together making steady progress over time. It was gratifying to see that incremental progress reflected in the excavations as well. Even if you were doing something as slow as cleaning a cobblestone walls/paths with a brush, over a couple weeks a few people could clean a surprisingly large fortress.

I don't feel the same about some of my years in tech. There are periods where I can't remember doing much of anything that could be called progress, even though I know that I was "meeting with stakeholders" and other ostensibly important things. There's this diffusion of responsibility that occurs in large orgs where everyone is micromanaging some infinitesimal slice of the mission while communication overhead and "following the process" consumes unimaginable amounts of time.

It's hard to not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and desire some kind of self-governed organizational anarchy, but I'm not sure where I think that line is best drawn.