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I fully agree with the sentiment, as I immediately get discouraged of doing anything as soon as it requires the approval from someone in another organization, which in large companies will often take weeks, if it happens at all. There's an argument to be made for bureaucracy: once you reach a certain scale (of complexity and/or size), the law of large numbers makes that you're prone to more risks than when you're a startup. It's "fine" for a startup to not be aware of the latest development of privacy policies in Finland, and if you provision a couple resources in the cloud everything's fine because when looking at the bill, you can simply ask around "who owns that thing?". At enterprise size, you're much more prone to be audited by governments, to be attacked by hackers, to be the target of lawsuits, to have runaway costs that get hard to diagnose ; and the complexity of your systems (wet or hard) doesn't increase linearly. I don't think you can avoid having some processes to control that. The problem is when the enterprise gets into a vicious cycle in which the only fix to any process issue is to slap on more process rather than rethink the existing ones. Such as illustrated in that post, where the solution to a lack of innovation is the creation of innovation heroes to incentivize the behaviour. I've been in three enterprise organizations, two of them have policies where you need to ask for permission, the other grants permission by default but reviews what's been done. That second policy is much better, as the level was quite high, people tend to respect the rule, and get caught if they don't. That allows for faster work. But then there's also the matter of recruitment. As a startup you can handpick people, create a team that's functional and with an edge. In an enterprise, recruiting is done at an industrial scale, where your inbound fresh flesh exposes you to the simple truth that, by definition, half of humanity is below the mean. |