Using a throwaway for this comment, but my first experience with this kind of thing was in 2013 when I joined a major international company with over 100k employees worldwide and realized that there were entire departments and organizations dedicated to delivering no value at all. Departments with 100s of people, with middle managers making several times the average salary in my country, where after years of work nothing of value was delivered and nobody was held responsible. I always wondered how companies like this can even exist and why shareholders invest in them.

Imagine that you decide that you would like to try farming, and you buy some geese. One of the geese, for whatever reason, begins to lay golden eggs. Your little farm is now unbelievably profitable. It is as profitable as your thousand closest neighboring farms combined. So naturally, you hire guards for the goose and experts on golden geese veterinary science to make sure that the goose is fed and healthy and is maximizing egg mass per day, and you hire people who figure out how to turn gold into wealth as profitably as possible, but at some point, you run out of ways to significantly improve the magic goose pipeline.

At this point, you've stopped growing. Not growing is completely unacceptable; it is anathema. So you start spending a lot of the money on long shot bets. Maybe try buying lots of geese to see if any lay golden eggs. You heard that somebody found a hen that lays golden eggs because of some magic beans, hire some bean farmers and see if that gets you more gold egg poultry. Jack who was the manager of goose calisthenics has really wanted a chance to grow, and he's dating your cousin, so let's put him in charge of the beans.

The only way to grow is long shot bets. Most of them will fail. All of them will be expensive. But the alternative is not growing. That can't ever happen.

Because in general they are still making more money than god on average.

This and they spend a lot of effort in rent seeking and otherwise ensuring their profits are encoded into laws.

Also, quite often those 100s of people sitting around are a political requirement. That is, they got some tax break to ensure X people have jobs. That is, it's a job program.

I was shocked by this as well. I think it's a natural property of large organizations and it takes great effort and great leaders to fight it.

The way I think about it is that building something truly successful comes with a tremendous amount of momentum. So much momentum that growth for these companies still occurs.

The people hired into a mature organization are literally there just to keep the lights on and let the momentum do its work. They also create and grow their little fiefdoms.

You can try and build something and innovate there, but it takes a deeply concerted effort to try and sustain it. Even if something is made wildly successful and is growing 50-100% year over year, it still likely pales in comparison to the 0.005% growth of the large core business.

Even if the new innovation is given space to breath, it can be killed at any point by the core business as the fiefdoms look over and say: that should be part of my org, or those resources can be better spent on the core business. So instead of waiting the years it takes for the new, small thing to grow large enough to be important it is easily killed by the parts of the organization just keeping the lights on.

Everyone knows this is true of every large enterprise shop and is one of the reasons that wall street rewards layoffs.

Follow the money, and answers become more obvious as to why. As to how? Hehehehe

entropy