In one example we had two teams asked to deliver the same calculation enginer: - Team A: 1 dev, ~1000 lines of code, ~ 3 months but in a tech he personally hated vs - Team B: 15 dev, project manager, 100k lines of code, 18 months.. and they stole someone from Team A to basically explain the business logic to them
Team Bs solution was also on delivery 10x slower. Team B won.
A year later once he was gone, it was all scrapped and given back to Team A.
I am doing it by myself. I'm the architect and I'm the engineer. I'm drafting the design and building it. And I did it. By myself. Inside of a month.
At the same time, another team is working on the same thing. Dozens of people on the team. Architects and engineers and a couple of data scientists. They took three months to get their first design out and it failed during testing. Their estimate to next iteration is two more months.
My design passed all the tests but one in the first trial and I fixed the remaining bugs inside of a week.
There's a good chance that the other team is going to have their product pushed into production ahead of mine, which will negate the need for mine so my code will get pushed to some archive server and sit there gathering dust.
Same goes for the azure work that I'm doing. Again alone and without any support vs our internal IT apparatus who has infinite money and can spin up temp teams with the push of a button.
And 'round and 'round it goes.
While in the open market the best or first product doesn't always win, it's at least a competition of cost/value/quality/marketing/timing.
Internal competition is largely personalities and politics, with a predictable winner before the timer starts. In the long run if there is enough management turnover the rational solution can win, but you are basically playing chicken with senior management to see who quits first!
> Today I find it ridiculous that a major corporation would allow huge groups to silo to this degree, to fail to communicate, cooperate, and share, and to allow them to build overlapping and competing products. To allow this kind of animosity to build between employees of the same company. We’re talking about thousands of engineers involved here, between the two divisions. Seems like something that could have only happened in the crazy 1980’s, but I am betting if enough people read this far, we will see comments to the contrary.
This happens very regularly and it is to the detriment of both the company and employees. I'll take the tech giants as an example, although this probably applies to other enormous organizations as well. Google displays this internal competition in one way, with a scattered, inconsistent, and ever-changing strategy for products like Chat that many on HN have joked is caused by promotion-driven engineering and cut-throat focus on personal gain. Amazon allows multiple teams to go after the same opportunities, with the mentality that it is better to have two horses in the race. Microsoft had inter-org competitive dynamics throughout the 2000s that was captured in the famous organizational chart of tech companies (https://www.businessinsider.com/big-tech-org-charts-2011-6) - although that culture may have changed under Satya Nadella's leadership.
Large companies are less like small businesses and more like small countries or governments. So naturally, politics arises - but companies are new to it and do a bad job of dealing with political dynamics. So when they allow internal competition, they don't even manage to create a "fair" playing field. More typically, there might one team that is chosen to be the "survivor" by an arbitrary executive decision, or there might be a part of the company with more resources that out-paces the others, or the company may just make effectively random choices, or whatever else. This can leave talented teams and employees jaded, frustrated, and burned out. It can also create immense distrust that those affected carry forward with them into subsequent jobs or their personal life. As for the products and the company - the best ideas don't necessarily survive this, and the loss of talent eventually accumulates towards the fall of a big company from its peaks.