My first exposure to big company management was, ironically, at a startup. They hired their C-level executives from big companies. Those executives hired VPs and extra layers of management who were also from big companies. Very quickly we had a deep org chart where ICs could be 5 steps removed from the CEO even though they hadn’t decided exactly what product we were going to build.
Everything was done by committee in increments of the 1-hour recurring meeting once a week. You could be on 10 of these recurring meetings for 10 different projects.
The first part of every meeting was a recap of last meeting. The middle part was about 20 minutes of trying to make progress on blocking items while the ex-BigCo managers came up with excuses for why they didn’t do their part yet (usually it was because they had too many meetings). The last 20 minutes was a performative exercise where we decided on action items for the week which we all knew were unlikely to get done.
The company went on like this for years after I left until they ran out of extra funds to keep the charade going. The management scattered to other “startups” where I’ve heard they’re continuing to repeat the same games.
