[AtlasBarfed]

Major companies like that become infected with large hierarchies of scum sucking middle management that eat revenue with bonuses.

Of course they are obsessed with shrinking labor costs and resisting all downsizing until it reaches comical levels.

Take a company like health insurance that can't show a large dividend because it would be a public relations disaster. Filled to the gills with vice presidents to suck up extra earnings. Or medical devices.

Software is also very difficult for these hierarchies of overpaid management, because you need to pay labor well to get good software, and the only raison d'etre of these guys is wage suppression.

Leadership is hard for these managers because the primary thing rewarded is middle management machiavellianism, turf wars, and domain building, and any visionary leadership or inspiration is quashed.

It almost fascinates me that large company organizations basically are like Soviet style communism, Even though there are opportunities for internal competition. Like data centers and hosting and it groups. They always need to be centralized for" efficiency".

Meanwhile, they are like 20 data centers and if you had each of them compete for the company's internal business, they'd all run more efficiently.

[andrekandre]

  > It almost fascinates me that large company organizations basically are like Soviet style communism, Even though there are opportunities for internal competition. 

probably because continuous competition is inefficient within an organization and can cause division/animosity between teams?

[AtlasBarfed]

"within an organization and can cause division/animosity between teams"

Are you aware of what goes on in middle management? This is the normal state of affairs between managers.

If what you are saying is true, then .......

Why is there competition in the open marketplace? You have just validated my suggestion that internally companies operate like communists.

[andrekandre]

  > Why is there competition in the open marketplace? You have just validated my suggestion that internally companies operate like communists.

i am not an expert, but i think the theory of competition leading to better outcomes in a marketplace is the availability of alternatives if one company went bad (in addition to price competition etc)

inside a company you are working for the same goal "against" the outside, so its probably more an artifact of how our economy is oriented

i'd guess if our economy was oriented around cooperation instead of "competition" (while keeping alternatives around) that dichotomy might go away...

just some random thoughts from an internet person

[AtlasBarfed]

A sufficiently large corporation, and to emphasize that we are in the age of monopoly and cartel with very little for these companies to fear from antitrust litigation, will have numerous opportunities for internal competition.

At a certain health insurance conglomerate back when I worked there, it was maddeningly hard to get servers and support, with ridiculous internal charge rates, "three months for a server", etc etc.

This was a company that easily had 10-20 datacenters, and likely support groups from a dozen acquisitions. Yes, internal competition would have greatly improved things. The proof has likely happened everywhere, when AWS came for these internal groups's lunches with far superior service and often lower rates. Those were the days when AWS was the hero, unlike today.

I too think humanity needs a mechanism to harness/encourage/reward altruism. The institution that used to provide this ... roughly ... was religion and local churches. I SAID ROUGHLY! I am no theist.

Capitalism rewards sociopathy, and successive generations of social engineering under maximalized capitalism (such as we see the march toward these days) will beat down altruism.

Or at least I used to think it would. Now it is apparent that maximalized consumer capitalism leads to collapsing birth rates and social withdrawal, which will cause humanity to collapse. It's a race between that and how fast we can wreck the environment.