Readit NewsThat kind of thinking is how we got the government sanctioned food pyramid. I'd rather think for myself, thanks.
I'm a nobody who came to Silicon Valley and has done relatively well for himself as a founder. I've seen many, many other founders with similar stories. We raised a significant amount of money and can spend it however we want. The worst I can say about my experience with investors is sometimes they can be arrogant. The ones that did invest in us have been nothing but incredibly humble and helpful. But going out of their way to screw someone over? I just haven't ever seen anything close to that happen to anyone in the 3 years I've been here.
I used to work in finance where they're much more ruthless. I have a classmate from undergrad who recently was arrested for "stealing trade secrets" from a hedge fund: http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2014/02/19/analyst-c.... Who knows what actually happened but that sort of stuff would never fly in Silicon Valley.
That's not to say I have the correct perspective but I always see these generalizations coming from you that seem so far off from my reality that I wonder what's going on. What happened to you?
The thing is, the level of intelligence to maintain the software has to exist somewhere. If it's not vested in a small number of people able to actually understand the system, then the intelligence ends up being an emergent property of the human automatons, Chinese-room style, with the now-important "manager" pretending to control it when in fact nobody does.
The thing is, the level of intelligence to maintain the software has to exist somewhere.
Yes it does. Nothing I've said suggests otherwise. But, let's say you can lower the amount of intelligence required to actually understand the system. Not much, just from "exceptional" (by which I mean 10x or the top 1% of programmers working in the field) to "average" (by which I mean the median level of intelligence for programmers working in the field). If you can do that, you lower your risk over the long term. If someone leaves, you can easily hire a replacement and get them up to speed.
The average big company grows at about ten percent a year. So if you're running a big company and you do everything the way the average big company does it, you can expect to do as well as the average big company-- that is, to grow about ten percent a year.
The same thing will happen if you're running a startup, of course. If you do everything the way the average startup does it, you should expect average performance. The problem here is, average performance means that you'll go out of business. The survival rate for startups is way less than fifty percent. So if you're running a startup, you had better be doing something odd. If not, you're in trouble.
Which is a quality of a fundamentally broken organizational system
No, it's a quality of a robust organizational system. Let's take a program that parses html as an example. What would you think of an html parser that only works well with high quality, strictly structured html and breaks under poorly formatted html? You would call it a fragile, broken system. But a parser that deals equally well with low quality html would be a well thought out, robust system. And here's the key to the point I was making: the robust system could be relied upon to do its job consistently even under less than ideal conditions.
A system that requires exceptional engineers to maintain it is a huge source of risk for any company. If your current exceptional engineer leaves for whatever reason, you have to find another one. If the reason your engineer left is your company is suddenly facing insolvency thanks to a nasty patent dispute, all you may be able to afford to hire is a college grad to maintain what you've already got.
But hey, you can hire cheap labour and they will be prevented from messing up too much, so corporations like it.
1. Background noise is said to be good for creative-type work: http://www.prevention.com/health/brain-games/how-noise-makes...
2. Breaking up your day into chunks and physically moving around are both potentially great for productivity. Joel Runyon recently dubbed this 'workstation popcorn': http://impossiblehq.com/workstation-popcorn
As for the sources given in the article, not a single one is credible.