Why are big tech companies so slow?

It's not incompetence or process

Author

Jakub Chodounsky
February 17, 2025

Why are big tech companies so slow?
6 minutes by Sean Goedecke

It's not incompetence or process, it's thousands of feature interactions. In this post Sean explores the reasons behind the perceived slowness of big tech companies, challenging common misconceptions. It debunks theories about incompetent engineers, inefficient processes, or laziness, instead attributing the slowdown to the inherent complexity of scaling up and managing an extensive array of features.

WarpStream is a Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) drop-in replacement for Apache Kafka that reduces costs by 80+% by eliminating local disks and interzone networking fees and simplifies operations with zero ops auto-scaling. It runs securely in your cloud with zero cross-account access. Sign up for a free account and see why companies like Cursor, PostHog, Zomato, and Grafana Labs use it in production.

In this article Elena discusses different company archetypes and how they impact career development. Each archetype offers distinct work environments, challenges, and career growth opportunities, with factors like company size, growth rate, and work culture significantly influencing the employee experience. The article emphasizes the importance of understanding these archetypes and evaluating personal preferences for change tolerance, pressure handling, role clarity, and financial priorities when making career decisions.

In this post Will discusses a strategy for improving data access controls at a pre-IPO company, focusing on balancing security requirements with usability. The strategy emphasizes automated, user-comprehensible rationales for data access, implementing role-based access controls, and maintaining comprehensive audit logs. The approach aims to overcome previous failed security initiatives that were undermined due to workflow disruptions, while meeting IPO readiness requirements and protecting user data effectively.

Gaining Years of Experience in a Few Months
5 minutes by Marc G Gauthier

While staying in your comfort zone can limit your career growth, there are also fast growth opportunities that enable the opposite. In this post Marc discusses how career growth and learning experiences aren't always linear, with some periods providing accelerated growth or "fast growth zones" where one can gain years' worth of experience in months. He shares their personal experience during a company acquisition, where intense challenges across multiple domains led to rapid professional development. Marc introduces a framework of different zones and suggests various strategies for cycling between these zones, emphasizing the importance of seizing rare growth opportunities while being mindful of burnout risks.

The Growth Maze vs The Idea Maze
11 minutes by Andrew Chen

Andrew discusses how AI product development is evolving from focusing solely on innovative ideas to also requiring effective distribution strategies. While early AI products succeeded primarily through technological breakthroughs, future success will depend on both having a good product idea and knowing how to reach the right audience through strategic decisions about marketing, pricing, and distribution channels. He suggests that AI itself will transform how companies navigate these growth challenges, potentially revolutionizing traditional marketing and distribution approaches.

Many product leaders complain that the company doesn’t have a strategy. But strategy is a mindset, and if you want to help your company get there, it starts with everyday discussions. Here’s how to make strategy a core part of the company culture. Noa discusses how to embed strategic thinking into company culture through three key directions: upward communication with management, sideways alignment with colleagues, and downward guidance to team members.

Great products don’t drown in features—they stay focused. Every extra option adds complexity, costs, and confusion. The best teams know that saying no is just as important as saying yes. Want to build software that stays simple, useful, and loved? Start by cutting the clutter. Here’s how.

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