[red-iron-pine]

size matters, but publicly traded matters more.

like sometimes that bureaucracy is a good thing. i remember an uncle who worked for EMC talking to me about being a big company vs. small company person; each has an advantage.

[eru]

> size matters, but publicly traded matters more.

Google has been publicly traded for most of its life, but things have changed over time regardless of that constant.

> like sometimes that bureaucracy is a good thing.

Employed right bureaucracy is one way to scale up processes.

Eg compare (1) keeping the whole state of your project in your head, or (2) in a personal notebook, or (3) on a share whiteboard with post it notes, (4) in Jira tickets.

Depending on the size of your project and organisation, you will find that the increased overhead of the higher-numbered methods might be worth it.

Of course, not all bureaucracy is the same. When I was at Google around 2014-2016 I found that they consistently achieved more benefits results from their bureaucracy at lower overheads than the big banks I used to work at (which weren't actually any bigger than Google).

Bureaucracy gets a bad rep but when done right (and defined broadly enough), it can help a lot.

Another example of bureaucracy done right is distributed version control: it's so convenient (after you get used to it..) that many people even use git on single person projects.

[ghaff]

>size matters, but publicly traded matters more.

It matters some but a very large private company still needs to organize and make money even if there's probably somewhat less immediacy.

>big company vs. small company person; each has an advantage

Yes. Small companies have limitations to what they can achieve even if they're impressive at small scale. And, certainly, software that doesn't involve enterprise sales allows for outsized effect.

But, in general, the level of just do what needs to be done that works at even a 1,000 person company totally breaks down at 10x and certainly 100x that scale. And that probably works well for people who abhor chaos and is anathema for people who sort of want to chart their own path.

[eru]

> It matters some but a very large private company still needs to organize and make money even if there's probably somewhat less immediacy.

For a company like Google, it's exactly the same. Even after going public, the founders still control the majority of stock voting rights. And there's no obligation in corporate law that you have to maximize profits.

It's just that you have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders; maximizing profits is one things shareholders can want, but it's not the only thing they are allowed to ask for.