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- Why is everything so hard in a large organization?
Why is everything so hard in a large organization?
#60 – October 25, 2021
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You're a member of a team that is part of a large organization. Welcome! This post is intended to help you navigate your environment.
While the number of job opportunities for software developer skyrockets together with salaries all around the world, fresh grads and junior developers struggle to even get invited for the interviews. Why does it happen and can we do anything about it?
An alternate title for this post might be, "Twitter has a kernel team!?". At this point, I've heard that surprised exclamation enough that I've lost count of the number times that's been said to me (I'd guess that it's more than ten but less than a hundred). If we look at trendy companies that are within a couple factors of two in size of Twitter (in terms of either market cap or number of engineers), they mostly don't have similar expertise, often as a result of path dependence — because they "grew up" in the cloud, they didn't need kernel expertise to keep the lights on the way an on prem company does. While that makes it socially understandable that people who've spent their career at younger, trendier, companies, are surprised by Twitter having a kernel team, I don't think there's a technical reason for the surprise.
I’m a manager, and my team is kind of going in circles. We have a critical project deadline, I’m trying to keep everyone moving forward, but it’s almost like we don’t know who’s in charge of what and it’s slowing us down. One thing to note, we typically try to solve problems as a team. Do you have any tips?
I was recently chatting with a friend who asked about finding senior leadership roles, and particularly doing so while you’re already gainfully employed.