Separating things orthogonally into different functions/silos sounds like how stable and large companies are run. Sounds like a recipe for disaster for a startup.
In many cases I believe this is caused by cargo culting big company practices and not realizing how fast you can move at smaller scale by cutting out unnecessary ceremony and empowering those who prioritize building and learning over talking and pontificating.
Yes, I suppose it is cause and effect. Inexperienced managers read about FAANG, or perhaps more likely Basecamp, and decide to copy it. Also having a ton of VC money means you can afford to hire non-productive people too early.
Been in a few places that turned the cargo cult to eleven. Someone brings an article about squads at Spotify and suddenly the team hierarchy changes. Someone discovers a blogpost about how desks on Amazon were made out of doors in the early days and suddenly all new desks are made of doors. Google releases Material design and we have to redesign the whole thing. And there’s also the playground slide and the plastic ball pool.
n=3 here but the amount of straight up nepotism I've seen makes my head spin.
I recently quit a job, without another lined up, at a startup where I couldn't even last a year. The CTO and the entire engineering management layer under him were all friends from high school.
