As with any large organization, it suffers similar challenges.
- Plenty of turnover and organizational restructuring. Each year titles are renamed, groups are volleyed back and forth between senior managers in the name of "growth" "efficiency" "synergy"
This leads to an unfortunate loss of direction each time a reorganization/management shift occurs in the technology organization. Despite these shifts, the groups and the organizational process/workflow/structure have remained relatively unchanged. The same groups talk to each other to get the same work accomplished. Rather than the Greens talking to the Yellows, it simply shifts to the Oranges talking to the Browns in title only.
It is very similar to the observation that mergers fail due to organizational processes not meshing together.
- A technology company severely incapacitated by the recent corporate culture of defendable decisions since the technology issues of the largest IPO. e.g. "No one ever got fired for hiring IBM."
This has mainly led to the culture comprised of skilled, agile teams, capable of building solutions, to incapable teams that have lost their top talent to turnover. The policies put forth make for a severely demoralizing & demotivating a workforce that's otherwise tremendously capable.
This makes for a fairly oppressive work environment and a structure that engenders mistrust. A small bit of sanity comes from the small alliances that are forged amongst the Romeos & Juliets of groups at odds with each other.
- Senior management is severely disconnected from the ground floor workers as they are incapable of dog-fooding the products & policies they put forth. As many know, an idea does not sell itself, but the hard work and attention to detail make the difference. By pushing policies in the name of leaving a legacy, resume bullet point, or being a yes-man, relationships & respect are broken.
- ADHD inducing distractions. Being an open setup, there's a tremendous lack of ability to focus on a task at hand.
