Your point about Googlers rings true—it is of course a point about a monolith Google world that saw/sees Google pass through ossification. Isn't it notable that today in Startupland there are many young companies that demonstrate monolith behavior internally? These companies don't have that past, but nonetheless their two-year "old" history seems to act as ossification. On the product: The notion of legacy code/design and technical debt already exists and they've become words used to constrain/justify product decisions. On the org structure side: Company is already organized into functions, they have functional managers, they have product managers, leadership group is big.
Perhaps, the reasons have more to do with other things you've written about. Those in charge aren't really running companies per se, they're self-optimizing for run-of-the-mill sociopathy—status, power, money (the personal wealth variety, not the company prospering type). This too might just connect to another suggestion in your post: the wealth/circumstances for many founders make for leaders who have consequences that don't matter. Those in charge are playing startup theater or founder theater and Act IV is more fun so they just skip ahead.
I zoomed in on just that one part of your writing—and therefore my point likely contains to just that—but I wonder if it does tweak the larger monolith idea. Can you be a monolith without history? Is monolith-behavior as consequential as being an actual monolith with monolith-collapsing consequences? Are these relatively small companies just small monoliths, functionally no different?
I would have said that you seemed trapped behind the monolithic event horizon of the idea of protocols, until https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/benefit-of-doubt-calculus demonstrated that once again you were pointing out the water to all us fishies
Your point about Googlers rings true—it is of course a point about a monolith Google world that saw/sees Google pass through ossification. Isn't it notable that today in Startupland there are many young companies that demonstrate monolith behavior internally? These companies don't have that past, but nonetheless their two-year "old" history seems to act as ossification. On the product: The notion of legacy code/design and technical debt already exists and they've become words used to constrain/justify product decisions. On the org structure side: Company is already organized into functions, they have functional managers, they have product managers, leadership group is big.
Perhaps, the reasons have more to do with other things you've written about. Those in charge aren't really running companies per se, they're self-optimizing for run-of-the-mill sociopathy—status, power, money (the personal wealth variety, not the company prospering type). This too might just connect to another suggestion in your post: the wealth/circumstances for many founders make for leaders who have consequences that don't matter. Those in charge are playing startup theater or founder theater and Act IV is more fun so they just skip ahead.
I zoomed in on just that one part of your writing—and therefore my point likely contains to just that—but I wonder if it does tweak the larger monolith idea. Can you be a monolith without history? Is monolith-behavior as consequential as being an actual monolith with monolith-collapsing consequences? Are these relatively small companies just small monoliths, functionally no different?
I would have said that you seemed trapped behind the monolithic event horizon of the idea of protocols, until https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/benefit-of-doubt-calculus demonstrated that once again you were pointing out the water to all us fishies