Working directly for clients and being personally responsible for the entirety of the development process gives you this perspective. You can have successful multi-person projects with almost no documentation and project management contained entirely in a single trello board with basic features.
Then, when you land in a corporation you can see how large teams barely manage to match your former personal productivity by choosing wrong technologies, taking wrong approaches, discussing irrelevant things in countless meetings and producing tons of write-only never-read documentation that gets obsoleted almost as fast as it is written. If you are too youthful and idealistic you can get a little arrogant experiencing this inefficiencies when you have a context to fully appreciate their insanity.
Or you may take another approach. That efficiency actually doesn't matter. People don't work to achieve anything. They work to get paid. And corporations have a lot of money. So the game is no longer about building stuff efficiently. It's about raking in as much money as you can for as long as you can and every inefficiency that justifies further work is actually best friend of everybody involved.
"That efficiency actually doesn't matter. People don't work to achieve anything. They work to get paid."
That is fine, but now you are stuck playing politics. You have to keep whoever is in charge of the money happy. And no value is created because everyone is trying to avoid getting blamed for problems.
Obviously, real companies, making real software also have to keep customers happy, but at least those requirements are somewhat predictable as they are tied to the real world use case, and real world value customers are getting from the product.
“ So the game is no longer about building stuff efficiently. It's about raking in as much money as you can for as long as you can and every inefficiency that justifies further work is actually best friend of everybody involved.”
You’re describing the goals of the individual becoming divergent from the goals of the company.
In the article the writer described his team’s goals at the VFX software company as being well aligned with the goals of the company and the customers. They even stayed late because they were enjoying solving the problem so much.
The same misalignment in goals is what made Communist Russia so awful. The stated goals were about providing prosperity to all workers and citizens of the USSR, but the goals of the committees became about personal advancement and the preservation of the party. It could be argued that the extreme job security of the dictatorship allowed this situation. If there had been a way to democratically fire officials, they would have been more aligned with the goals of the people. (A politician is only as good as your ability to fire them.)
Many large companies end up like the USSR. The way to solve this is to allow teams to fire their managers.
"The way to solve this is to allow teams to fire their managers."
I don't follow. Wouldn't most teams replace their manager with a manager who would give everyone the biggest raises and the easiest working conditions?
Why would a team want a manager who cares about the goals of the company?
Then, when you land in a corporation you can see how large teams barely manage to match your former personal productivity by choosing wrong technologies, taking wrong approaches, discussing irrelevant things in countless meetings and producing tons of write-only never-read documentation that gets obsoleted almost as fast as it is written. If you are too youthful and idealistic you can get a little arrogant experiencing this inefficiencies when you have a context to fully appreciate their insanity.
Or you may take another approach. That efficiency actually doesn't matter. People don't work to achieve anything. They work to get paid. And corporations have a lot of money. So the game is no longer about building stuff efficiently. It's about raking in as much money as you can for as long as you can and every inefficiency that justifies further work is actually best friend of everybody involved.