Why does every single company that once used to be decent eventually fall into hot garbage?
Small group (1-5 people) gets idea for (thing). If they don't have the smarts to develop it to usability, stop here.
Small group releases (thing). If (thing) is unpopular, stop here.
(Thing) gets popular. If small group refuses to grow to maintain the exponential increase in communications/downloads/support/whatever, it collapses. Stop here.
Group is now a medium-sized group. The original idea people are now overseeing groups of hand-selected new hires in the further work on (thing). If (thing) caps at modest popularity, stop here.
Popularity increases further. More people are hired. Group is now a big group. Original idea people are now in upper management positions, with their original hires being in the oversight positions that used to be the top positions back when the organization was smaller. The biggest nerd among the originals might be head of development, but that's still management. By now he can't understand (thing)'s recent changes. People he's never even met are working on (thing) and only following his instructions as filtered through his subordinates and their competing requirements (budget, deadline, etc.). No one working directly on (thing) can say "Stop, we can't release this today, it's not ready. We need another week."
An HR department now exists to handle the volume of staff, staffed by liberal arts types who understand liberal arts but don't understand (thing) any better than a layman. These people are now in charge of finding new people to work on (thing), with direction from people who were maybe hired by people hired by the originals.
Before long, the organization has started to become top heavy. HR has more interest in HR than (thing) and it starts to show. Meetings are more often about policy than development. Upper management loses direct contact with both the market and the actual engineering of (thing), their decisions now being filtered through multiple 3rd parties. New visionaries are never hired - the organization has too much momentum to pivot to their ideas, which fail 9 times out of 10 anyway. Eccentrics are fired or kicked sideways or otherwise forced out because even if they were instrumental to the development of (thing) they don't work well now in an organization where "Shut the fuck up." is no longer acceptable in a meeting, no matter how much the person speaking needs to be told to shut the fuck up.
(Thing) keeps going because of momentum. As the square root of the number of people in a group do half the work, those people start leaving for greener pastures, since the hardest workers are often the most stifled by org chart bloat or the ones most able to see the writing on the wall. Organization is now almost as big but only half as skilled.
Repeat the last step a few more times, with each new layer of more mediocre half-of-the-work-workers leaving as they realize it ain't what it used to be.
I think the big problem is people don't understand mid-level jobs so you see a lot of people in IT, programming, and technology who only understand it slightly better than the HR recruiter. Same deal with accounting, people make a simple task overly complicated to keep their cushy job.
Small group (1-5 people) gets idea for (thing). If they don't have the smarts to develop it to usability, stop here.
Small group releases (thing). If (thing) is unpopular, stop here.
(Thing) gets popular. If small group refuses to grow to maintain the exponential increase in communications/downloads/support/whatever, it collapses. Stop here.
Group is now a medium-sized group. The original idea people are now overseeing groups of hand-selected new hires in the further work on (thing). If (thing) caps at modest popularity, stop here.
Popularity increases further. More people are hired. Group is now a big group. Original idea people are now in upper management positions, with their original hires being in the oversight positions that used to be the top positions back when the organization was smaller. The biggest nerd among the originals might be head of development, but that's still management. By now he can't understand (thing)'s recent changes. People he's never even met are working on (thing) and only following his instructions as filtered through his subordinates and their competing requirements (budget, deadline, etc.). No one working directly on (thing) can say "Stop, we can't release this today, it's not ready. We need another week."
An HR department now exists to handle the volume of staff, staffed by liberal arts types who understand liberal arts but don't understand (thing) any better than a layman. These people are now in charge of finding new people to work on (thing), with direction from people who were maybe hired by people hired by the originals.
Before long, the organization has started to become top heavy. HR has more interest in HR than (thing) and it starts to show. Meetings are more often about policy than development. Upper management loses direct contact with both the market and the actual engineering of (thing), their decisions now being filtered through multiple 3rd parties. New visionaries are never hired - the organization has too much momentum to pivot to their ideas, which fail 9 times out of 10 anyway. Eccentrics are fired or kicked sideways or otherwise forced out because even if they were instrumental to the development of (thing) they don't work well now in an organization where "Shut the fuck up." is no longer acceptable in a meeting, no matter how much the person speaking needs to be told to shut the fuck up.
(Thing) keeps going because of momentum. As the square root of the number of people in a group do half the work, those people start leaving for greener pastures, since the hardest workers are often the most stifled by org chart bloat or the ones most able to see the writing on the wall. Organization is now almost as big but only half as skilled.
Repeat the last step a few more times, with each new layer of more mediocre half-of-the-work-workers leaving as they realize it ain't what it used to be.
And here we are.
I think the big problem is people don't understand mid-level jobs so you see a lot of people in IT, programming, and technology who only understand it slightly better than the HR recruiter. Same deal with accounting, people make a simple task overly complicated to keep their cushy job.