Why are big tech companies so slow?

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2025-01-24 17:30:08

Big tech companies spend a lot of time and money building things that a single, motivated engineer could build in a weekend. This fact puzzles a lot of people who don’t work in big tech. Often those people share theories about why this is true:

The first theory - that their engineers are incompetent - is widely held by game devs and hackers, who have a particular disdain for how slow and inefficient big company code often is. You’ll see these people doing back-of-envelope estimates for how fast it “should” be to serve a HTTP request, and scoffing at big company web apps that are 10x or 100x slower than that. The second, third, and fourth theories are typically held by startup grinders, who believe that operating with low process and hiring people dedicated to the mission is their comparative advantage against big tech companies. The fifth theory is held by big tech employees themselves (or engineers who are temporarily-embarassed big tech employees). The idea here is that big tech companies just work on a different level than your personal projects or lowly startups, so you couldn’t even begin to understand what it takes to build a CRUD form in that environment.

All of these theories are wrong. Many big tech engineers are lazy or incompetent, or slowed down by bad process, but big tech companies are not stupid: they still keep hiring engineers because it’s fabulously profitable to do so.