After working at several large $techCompanyAcronym companies, I agree with the author's premise, but I don't agree that the time gets wasted in planning/bickering over color palettes. I also don't agree that there's a CYA culture in large companies, at least not at the front line worker level.
Here are a few issues I see:
A lack of achievable goals. They tend to be massive multi-year long initiatives. It's hard to feel any sort of urgency from a 2 year project. Even if it's broken into 6 month long chunks, it's hard to feel urgency given if you slip the first milestone, you've still got 1.5 years to go. Additionally, large projects suffer from analysis paralysis. I don't think this is a malicious thing, I think folks genuinely don't know what it is they need to do.
It's easy to hide in a large company. Generally, the longer it takes you to be productive the longer you can do nothing before getting noticed and/or actually terminated. An 8-12 month ramp up time is average in my experience. When the company only has 20 engineers it's easy to find the ones not pulling their weight. When you have 100k engineers, it way harder, and stack rankings, and the resulting hire-to-fire, are put into place.
Mandatory and optional training and non-work related events consume a lot of time. By non-work I mean things not relevant to the team's objectives. One could easily do nothing by participating in all the summits, trainings, meetings, wellness events, interviews, debriefs, design reviews, security reviews, etc.
Here are a few issues I see:
A lack of achievable goals. They tend to be massive multi-year long initiatives. It's hard to feel any sort of urgency from a 2 year project. Even if it's broken into 6 month long chunks, it's hard to feel urgency given if you slip the first milestone, you've still got 1.5 years to go. Additionally, large projects suffer from analysis paralysis. I don't think this is a malicious thing, I think folks genuinely don't know what it is they need to do.
It's easy to hide in a large company. Generally, the longer it takes you to be productive the longer you can do nothing before getting noticed and/or actually terminated. An 8-12 month ramp up time is average in my experience. When the company only has 20 engineers it's easy to find the ones not pulling their weight. When you have 100k engineers, it way harder, and stack rankings, and the resulting hire-to-fire, are put into place.
Mandatory and optional training and non-work related events consume a lot of time. By non-work I mean things not relevant to the team's objectives. One could easily do nothing by participating in all the summits, trainings, meetings, wellness events, interviews, debriefs, design reviews, security reviews, etc.