> Large organisations are so woefully inefficient that I'm surprised they're able to compete at all
It's easy to understand: large orgs are competing against other large orgs that are similarly inefficient, because efficiency in a large org is a really, really, really hard human problem that we simply haven't solved.
And remember they're still providing a valuable service/product. For all their inefficiency, they're still more efficient than not existing at all. This is why they would exist if there weren't competition.
And you might ask, what about competition from small orgs? Well, a small org has less efficiencies of scale, but if they are efficient otherwise, they can sometimes compete effectively with the large org. But then they grow into a large org and will wind up with all of the large org inefficiencies.
It's just how things are. It's not that nobody cares -- to the contrary, company owners care hugely. It's that literally nobody has any idea how to solve it.
> It's easy to understand: large orgs are competing against other large orgs that are similarly inefficient, because efficiency in a large org is a really, really, really hard human problem that we simply haven't solved.
We used to break up companies that became Too Large. Either they became so large that it was impossible to compete against them (as Large Company can demand way better pricing on volume than Small Startup can or has way better access to financial instruments due to better ratings, or like many automotive companies even run their own goddamn bank), or because they could use a wildly profitable business to price-dump competitors out of existence or because they became so large that they felt free to extort their customers to the tune the people would complain about it in the media/their congresspeople too much, or because they became so large their sheer size represented too much economic risk ("too big to fail").
We should begin doing that again. Something as big as Google/Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Meta/Facebook, Walmart, the Big Four consultancy shops, virtually all major banks - there's absolutely no reason these should be allowed to exist at their current size. Or, if these companies still wish to exist at their size / their existence as one platform, they at least have to be regulated to mitigate the threat originating from that scale.
> When I'm talking about how large companies have inefficient processes, it doesn't really matter if the company has 10,000 employees or 100,000.
My argument is that there should not be companies this large at all. Everything above 100-500 people tends to breed a layer of pointless middle management layers and a host of supporting bullshit jobs, and in many cases the lack of internal competition leads to ossification.
So, yes, of course one may argue that without this one couldn't build something as complex as an airplane, a GPU or whatever... I'd say, keeping a cluster of teams as distinct companies, maybe with some sort of "service company" that deals with shit like payroll, travel expenses and whatnot, is actually more efficient as it offers a chance for people to get (literally) invested into their work and have the profits end up in their wages as well instead of everything being siphoned off in increasingly opaque ways. And it enforces proper working processes (e.g. documentation about interfaces), and so actually reduces the chance of stuff going wrong.
It's easy to understand: large orgs are competing against other large orgs that are similarly inefficient, because efficiency in a large org is a really, really, really hard human problem that we simply haven't solved.
And remember they're still providing a valuable service/product. For all their inefficiency, they're still more efficient than not existing at all. This is why they would exist if there weren't competition.
And you might ask, what about competition from small orgs? Well, a small org has less efficiencies of scale, but if they are efficient otherwise, they can sometimes compete effectively with the large org. But then they grow into a large org and will wind up with all of the large org inefficiencies.
It's just how things are. It's not that nobody cares -- to the contrary, company owners care hugely. It's that literally nobody has any idea how to solve it.