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by eru 824 days ago
> 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.