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by jl6 1057 days ago
To your second paragraph…

Big orgs (regardless of public or private) can exploit economies of scale, which makes cheap products possible and available to the masses.

Big orgs have big org problems that small orgs don’t (HR, Legal, Architecture, …), so they need specialist senior leaders who spend their days doing things that rank-and-file staff don’t understand, and usually don’t even know need to be done.

HN loves to rag on the C-suite, but they are real jobs that need real skills. To all the armchair CxOs confident that boards are idiots and are paying their execs for nothing, all I can say is: try it.

1 comments

Economies of scale matter less in industries where the most important factor in the cost of the product is labor, which is the case for software engineering. Unless, of course, you're implying that big orgs can cut costs by driving wages down.

And the problem with large corporate boards isn't that they're idiots - it's that they're dominated by sociopaths. They aren't paying their execs for nothing - they're paying their execs to screw over their employees and their customers most effectively - which is, indeed, a real job that does need real skills.