Do large organizations' priorities and hiring decisions serve internal politics and status rather than customers or products?

Edwin Chen · Jul 21, 2025

At large companies, priorities get set to impress managers and feed internal company machinery rather than because they help the end customer or product

Chains of justification bottom out in internal needs — improving a tool to make people 5% more productive because they spend 20% of their time interviewing because the org is growing for growth's sake — leaving priorities divorced from the customer; being small instead gives everyone direct visibility into customer problems

5:56 Priorities serve internal machinery and manager approval not customers

Edwin Chen · Jul 21, 2025

Outsiders don't realize how much work inside prestigious large companies exists purely to perpetuate and grow internal company machinery

Many people in those organizations aim not to build a product but to be able to say they run a thousand-person org, so their work becomes growing headcount and proving that org efficient to their VP or CEO

7:13 Employees grow headcount to claim running large orgs rather than build product

Edwin Chen · Jul 21, 2025 · hedged

You can distinguish doers from empire-builders in hiring by the questions candidates ask — product and user-flow questions versus questions about becoming a manager and hiring headcount

The questions at the forefront of someone's mind reveal what they actually care about

8:19 Interview questions about product vs management reveal doer vs empire builder

Edwin Chen · Jul 21, 2025

Many roles companies hire for aren't actually important, and there is a negative incentive to hire for hiring's sake because low headcount growth is read by others as the company doing badly

If someone says their engineering org grew 2% this year, the instinctive reaction is that they must not be doing well — a negative incentive to hire for hiring's sake

31:11 Low headcount growth is misread as failure creating incentive to overhire

Cliff Obrecht · Jan 27, 2023

Founders commonly focus too much on the art of running a company and not enough on the art of creating value, losing sight of why the business exists

As businesses grow, leaders get caught up in internal politics and the next big hire, but all a customer ever sees is the digital product — if that product isn't delightful, the business will fail

44:45 Founders neglect value creation for internal politics and the art of running the company

Jean-Denis Greze · Jul 21, 2023

At a large company, the best thing to work on is something that has real business impact but that leadership doesn't care about

Impact is the North Star, and impact is hard to achieve because politics and internal incentives get in the way; correspondingly, leaders should ask what it says about them if the best things for the business are happening where they're not looking

45:45 The best work at a large company often has real impact but goes unrecognized by leadership due to internal politics