This resonated strongly with me. Last time I worked in an Enterprise shop, I happened to inherit the approval system - every app in the entire org, whether an internal app or from a vendor, got configured into this home-grown monstrosity of an access approval system. It actually worked well despite being made of spaghetti, but one side effect of being the tech owner was that I knew exactly who was in charge of every system in the organization. At some point I realized that my success there was at least partially due to being the human who knew how to connect all the dots, because when someone needed such info, the answer for the entire org was, "Ask Dave."
Joking aside, I was intrigued by the list of good things at the end of the post. Some I could understand, but some seemed to fall into that strange category of things that people say are good but really seem only to lead to more of the things they say are bad. In this list we have:
> There are actual opportunities for career development.
Does "career development" just mean "more money"? If so, why not just say "there are opportunities to make more money"? If not, what is "career development" that is not just becoming more deeply buried in an organization with the various dysfunctions described in the rest of the post?
> It's satisfying to write software used by millions of people.
Is it still satisfying if that software is bad, or harms many of those people?
In life, everyone that thinks a lot is eventually confronted with the reality that we're all just minor players within much bigger systems. When you follow this thread, pretty deep questions start to fall out like "how can I be just in an unjust society?". Or "what's the best way that I, as an individual, can have a positive impact on my community?". Or "Is there any point in trying to change systems given my small role within them?".
To these types of questions there's various different responses and consequences. Some people dive in feet first and engage heavily with the mechanisms they have to enact change (such as local politics, grass roots political movements, activism etc). Some people, overwhelmed by the weight of the system, disengage entirely.
Now to answer your question, I believe in the work that we're doing (or else I probably wouldn't have joined). Career development at the company isn't just more money (though that's obviously a component), it's being given more responsibilities alongside the capacity to enact more and more change.
Faced with a dysfunctional organisation that you're a part of, what do you do? The options as I see it are roughly:
- Change companies, and acknowledge that the dysfunction is insurmountable.
- Do your job and stay at the position you're in.
- Embed deeper into the dysfunctional organisation, with the view that you can be an agent for positive change.
>Is it still satisfying if that software is bad, or harms many of those people?
To some people, yes. There are people out there that take satisfaction in doing harm. Not me, nor do I believe the work I do is harmful. I didn't think I had to be so granular as to say "It's satisfying to write software I believe is a net positive to society used by millions".
In any case, I didn't mean to imply that what you're doing is any more objectionable than anything I or a zillion other people do when we make the same tradeoffs you allude to. What I was mostly reacting to was that you mentioned those things in the section on things you viewed positively, whereas they seem to me like they still incorporate a tradeoff involving a significant amount of badness. Perhaps though you simply meant they were tipped at least slightly toward the positive side on balance, which makes sense.
I'm not trying to invalidate your post; I think your essay is great. I think it just does have enough cynicism. These $ENTERPRISE companies basically set up their employees some kinda game. There are certain rules (some written, some unwritten) for how you get a good performance review and how you get promoted. Just like there were dumb rules for you had to write code on a whiteboard to get the job despite the fact that you have never written algorithms ever, much less on a white board. So you have to balance how much you are doing something actually useful with jumping through whatever hoops that are downstream of whatever idea your VP has come up with this week. In the ideal case you move yourself to a part of the company that aligns with your values and interests so that the promotion comes easily, but sometimes it is easier to stay where you are and just grind through whatever absurdity it takes to stay employed.
Big companies means more opportunities to lead bugger project. At a big company, it’s not uncommon to in-house what would’ve been an entire startup’s product. And depending on the environment, you may work on several of those project over the course of a few years. Or if you want to try your hand at leading bigger teams, that’s usually easier to find in a big company.
> Is it still satisfying if that software is bad, or harms many of those people?
There’s nothing inherently good about startups and small companies. The good or bad is case-by-case.
Done right, you can be a disruptor, for what are very benign or proven changes outside of the false ecosystem you are in.
I recommend these changes are on the level of "we will allow users to configure a most used external tool on a core object, using a URI template" - the shock, awe, destruction is everyone realizing something is a web app and you could just... If you wanted... Use basic HTML to make lives better.
Your opponents are then arguing against how the web works, and you have won the framing with every employee that has ever done something basic with a browser.
You might find this level of "innovation" silly, but it's also representative of working in the last few tiers of a distribution curve - the enterprise adopters lagging behind the late adopters.
Okay, so career development means "bigger projects"?
> There’s nothing inherently good about startups and small companies. The good or bad is case-by-case.
Well, maybe not, but I think the post illustrates some ways big companies are worse. I'd say that, all else being equal, companies tend to get bigger by becoming more doggedly focused on money, which tends to lead to doing evil things because you no longer see refraining from doing so as important compared to making money. Also, all else equal, a company that does something bad on a small scale is likely less bad than one that does something bad on a large scale.
So career development really means ‘learning a completely different skillset which is not technical’
Personally I'd struggle to consider that "development" for my own life, since it often amounts to no longer doing the job I like and instead watching other people do it. I can understand how adding new skills is positive, though.
If you want to become a researcher in data science or developper evangelist for instance, you'll need a org that can sustain your work.
Or if you want to be a micro service architect, you'll be booed in a 3 people shop but heartfully welcomed in 3000 people companies.
Same for engineering manager paths, it only makes sense if you have the headcount.
> software is bad, or harms
What you work on doesn't need to be Enterprise software. Hopefully it isn't.
Unfortunately, because most of those 3000 will think about the fact their org is 3000 people. Not that the user base for the new product is 5 people using it only on the weekend.
That was not my takeaway, because earlier he alluded (twice) to the fact that titles are a thing:
1. A senior technical person who can't turn on a computer and an analyst not being able to speak english,
2. `I have met no less than 6 (six) people with the title "head of architecture".`
So I am guessing that is what he means by "career development"; you can acquire impressive titles.
I cannot understand this sort of notion at all.
1. You don't care about $SOMETHING - great, I can understand that.
2. You don't understand why others care about $SOMETHING - Sure, I can understand that too.
3. You feel a need to broadcast this lack of understanding to the world - wtf?
I mean, I'm ignorant on a lot of subjects, but I hardly ever boast about my ignorance.
It's like when people proudly tell me "Oh no, I've never been any good at Maths": sure, lots of people aren't good at reasoning, but is being stupid something to brag about?
Yeah, but mine was contextual; I replied to someone complaining that they can't understand. That reply was not contextual, it was simply virtue signalling.
No. Career development includes paid training sessions, title promotions (junior -> senior, etc.) opportunities to work on larger projects in more significant roles (resume building), and opportunities to transfer into management, as well as (in some cases) opportunities to publish conference papers and the like. As you get older, this kind of career development becomes more important because it is recognized by people who will hire you.
And something that most people in an enterprise are just not all that interested in, since they’re never judged on how pleasant the software they deliver is to use.
Hell, they not ever see any of the users interacting with the software. I’ve been at $ENTERPRISE for 7 years, and I’ve visited our users exactly once.
This is how I’ve seen two-month projects becoming multi-year multi-team behemoths.
And yes we were judged on how pleasant to use our software was. If we miss a feature or ship a feature that customers intensely dislike, best believe that we’ll get a torrent of negative feedback on our support channels
- in more than two AWS regions
- required screen reader / disability support
- required multi-language support
- required multi-cloud
- actually needed a big Hadoop cluster - most enterprise data processing can be done on a MacBook Pro M4.
It was internal shadow IT at its finest. It’s still used today, despite the people at the top not liking it the users think it’s the best thing since sliced bread.
Like the poster of the blog article, I too have worked in very large enterprise. Think 200K staff, 10K distinct servers, etc...
I had the lucky opportunity to assist the CTO in hundred-million-dollar enterprise software purchasing decisions. I got to interview vendor after vendor, grilling them to see if they're compatible with "large enterprise".
Most weren't.
This wasn't about some Kafkaesque hoops they had jump through while blindfolded and on fire, although I'm sure that's the impression most of them got.
The requirements were simple and perfectly sound architecture principles that they either met or did not meet. If they didn't meet them, then maybe their software was "good enough" for tiny clients, but would never work at scale.
I even made a list, which from memory was something like:
1. Support single-sign-on from external sources such as LDAP, OAuth, whatever. (We're not going to sync our directory and every user password to your insecure garbage software.)
2. Have some sort of audit log. Administrative or configuration changes especially. (Some places have hundreds of admins, not all of whom are fully trusted.)
3. Have an unattended installation process, even if it's just VM cloning or whatever. (I'm not clicking through your GUI wizard 500 times at 3am on Sunday morning.)
4. Allow incremental migrations/upgrades. I.e.: The "easy" process of stop-the-world; one-way-big-bang; start-the-world process is not viable in an enterprise with 10K tenants where the upgrade may or may not work for all of them on the first try.
5. Scale. This can be as simple as having indexes on "user" and "tenant" tables, which is easily overlooked when the typical dev works with a scale of 1 user and 1 tenant. Similarly, using combo boxes / drop downs is a no-go for most fields such as security groups. (We have 700K security groups. No, we can't delete 699.9K as a workaround to make your GUI not crash from an OOM error.)
6. Accessibility is mandatory. With up to 200K permanent and 1 million occasional users, every disability will be represented. Not just vision or hearing problems, but motor-neuron issues, amputees, etc... (You name it, we have someone on staff with it.)
Etc...
Seen in that light, Enterprise software starts to make sense. It's not baroque or malicious, it's just taken on a certain form to suit a purpose.
For example, I didn't understand why Active Directory uses search dialog boxes for every "picker" GUI control instead of a simpler drop-down or something similar... until I worked in an environment with 2 million objects in the directory.
I was able to find us an open-source / self-hosted solution that worked far better (bookstack). But I was amazed at how far the company selling the software got with us -- seems like most never get pushback, they just make sales by labeling themselves as fit-for-purpose regardless of whether or not they generally work.
And that’s when you realize that searching in AD is actually dog slow, and you are better off just syncing the whole thing to a proper database, then checking if the object still exists after.
Seriously, why does a search that takes 1ms in postgres take 3 full seconds in AD?
Because when specialization occurs, every specialized component (including people) is selected against performance and other non-essential metrics.
if safety standards are written in blood then enterprise software is written in lawsuits
Disagree with this. In the places I’ve worked, I’ve lost count of the number of times we turned down feature requests with the explanation that - this isn’t common practice and seems to be unique to you.
Yes, with the caveat that the customer is not - nor does not represent - the actual end-users. The customer is someone in procurement.
...or nepotism is involved.
To me it seems it’s related to the specialist-generalist point that it’s easier to focus on one thing rather than to do all the chores you face in SME environments.
> > It's satisfying to write software used by millions of people. > > Is it still satisfying if that software is bad, or harms many of those people?
I work for a bank, so the software/service my colleagues and I deliver is probably at best "bottom of mind" for most people and at worst actively despised by many (maybe not even our specific implementation of it, but the idea in general that you depend on some behemoth to receive and send money).
Still it's very satisfying to deliver it, because if I mess up it's my mom that will no longer be able to pay for her online purchase or that large energy company everyone knows that can not pay out their salaries. What I do directly impacts people's lives in very practical and real ways. I would really miss that if I worked on some niche SaaS product with a few customers only.
sadly many engineers might detach or feel powerless or simply not their part of the job, and only be attracted to the huge scale. sadly you can only ever work at that scale if you work for a few of the giants, of which mostly all do the same algorithmic dark patterns extraction methods shareholder benefit maximalism capitalism pushes them into
If your boss tells you it is urgent, it is probably not.
If people working in the field call you directly, now you have a real emergency.
The reason is simple. If it comes from your boss, it probably went up the ladder, showed up in red in some report made to the top management who then got all worked up, started shouting orders that got down the corporate ladder until it hit you. In reality, it may have taken weeks between the time the problem happened and the time it came back to you. It can wait until you finish your current task.
People stuck on the field are not going to wait that long, they want a solution now and if they can't do it by themselves, they will focus all of their energy into finding people who can and contact them directly, instead of just writing a memo to whoever wants to read it.
- new leadership will push out the old guard and replace them with friends
- groups get renamed for the Nth time in N years. People continue to do the same job, but now the department has an additional "Innovation", "Discovery", or "Leadership" inserted into the title
Sometimes, I wish we name the team ‘Pikachu’ and continue on working. This way, others would know the name does not really matter, so they would stop changing the name. The amount of work to change the documentation and lets others know our team changed name has caused a lot of unnecessary work.
I unironically suggested we just call ourselves $PROJECT RED and $PROJECT BLUE, and refer to the entirety of the team-pair as $PROJECT PURPLE. Nobody liked that, but it is what we ended up calling ourselves internally.
While talking to friends at other empire:
> I've been digging around, who are the members of Ludicolo?
> Oh, we've renamed to Felbat.
My mortal nemesis brings his whole helpdesk and development team across slowly whenever he starts at a new business. Which is crazy, because as far as I can see the benefit to him is simply loyalty. They dont complain or go over his head when he fails to deliver. I have receipts from staff who worked with him at other businesses where he just follows the same pattern.
1. Identify problems (The problem is the lack of a new CRM from a big microsoft partner.)
2. Spend lots of money to fix the problem (Free trips to vegas 3 times per year thanks to the CRM partner and microsoft)
3. Fail to deliver the CRM (The problem was not a big enough scope)
4. Rescope the project. (more bennies)
5. Would have failed to deliver it again however I just got a new job transforming another business enjoy your crapheap.
Amen, Amen... Preach brother!
All this rings true, from the complete org dysfunction, to the security theatre, all of it paints the hellscape of large enterprises in great detail.
My own personal struggles in this corner world resonate strongly here. I worked in a large energy company, with layers upon layers of incompetence and waste.
Including paying a consulting company a small fortune to build a data warehouse that was so locked down that they had to pay them more and regularly, to access the data it contained.
Security theatre where bozos would open your desk drawer if it was unlocked and confiscate your paper notes and books unless you crawled back to the apologizing.
The ultimate shame. Do you care nought for the security of the ip on those pages?!
Remove the comment about ever having to work a weekend
Remove the comment about there being opportunities for (technical) career development
Remove the comment about upskilling / training being encouraged
financial profit, again, depends on the person but those $ENTERPRISE 401k's are pretty nice w/ company matching.
If you prefer. Millions wasted on projects going nowhere fast, it no budget for even keeping up with inflation for salaries.
I'm currently at $MIDSIZENOLONGERSTARTUP, which incidentally has its own slew of insane and draining things that are breaking me in its own way.
In my experience it's the small shops who are more likely to batter you with 12-stage interview processes, LeetCode-style tests, and creepy 'Record a video of yourself talking about why you want to work for BONTO' exercises. I've worked nearly my entire career at enterprise companies, and I can safely say they've always treated me with more respect in both the interview process and the job itself, than the smaller companies. Keep in mind, I live in Australia, and I've never worked for FAANG, which will skew my perspective.
Several times, I've been ready to do really great work for my two favorite FAANGs, but their insistence on the hazing rituals wipes out any interest I have.
As paradoxically as it sounds, aside from the rounds of russian roulette my health feels quite good. ... what?
Should you really just accept that and still claim job security?
Is this what stockholm syndrome feels like?
I wouldn't say I have the perfect job security, but I'm reasonably assured I'll get paid this month and I try not to worry about situations that haven't happened yet. I think if I had a family that depended entirely on me I'd be much more concerned.
I'm not sure I'd call it stockholm syndrome directly, but I'd agree it's definitely some form of conditioning.
The other thing about working for $BIGCORP is that it molds your skills to be hyper-specific to this company. It's less about learning to use cool technology stacks, than it is about learning the internal tools, procedures, and unspoken etiquette of the company. Skills that are vital to navigate the everyday complexity of $BIGCORP, but that you can't really export to any other job.
But I also found that once you reach a certain level of expertise at $BIGCORP there are few opportunities to try to push the boundaries of your domain knowledge, lest you are dead-set on taking initiatives and swim against the current of a rigid organisation. That may just be specific to my job and employer though.
And while the part about navigating internal complexity is true as well, it's harder to highlight on a CV than "I have worked with technologies X, Y and Z". At best you can say "I have worked with X at a big corp, and also Y, which you probably don't know because it's an internal tool." You just have to hope that the name of your employer alone carries enough weight on its own.
No. But all those tools and processes? Those are valuable at smaller companies -- or maybe even a SaaS when you leave.
Tools and processes from “third-place mobile phone operator in country X” or “leading grocery wholesaler in country Y”? Most likely not.
The world is full of quite large companies that need surprisingly much software and are very bad at it.
The author went from small companies to a big one. Has anyone gone the other way? I'm looking to make that shift and I'm curious how others framed their Enterprise™ experience in a way that resonates with smaller teams.
Unfortunately, I've found that describing what I've learned over the past three years (without any negativity) gives founders the ick. The survival skills you need in the jungle are very different from the ones you need in a zoo, and they feel I've spent too much time in a zoo.
Similarly, large companies want to hire people who understand the value of processes and hierarchies, and interviewing at these places is a challenge for those who have spent most of their career in startups.
Try describing where you want to be and not so much where you have been.
By that, I mean when interviewing with smaller organizations, pick out the things you have learned which would be beneficial to a much lesser funded effort. For example:
- automated builds are repeatable
- unit/feature/integration tests translate to lower costs
- too many layers of management stifles progress
- <insert other lessons you have learned here>Unfortunately the pay cut might be a lot bigger than 20%. I've seen people have "the same job" where one gets paid $300k p.a. at FAANG and another $60k at a small company (while getting a lot more done).
I have and the biggest difference is that the larger the company, the more the problem to solve is interpersonal and/or group politics and not technical issues.
Large companies typically take a Golden Handcuffs[0] approach to retain valuable employees. Usually, this makes people who have options to leave accept more organizational bovine excrement than if the financial carrot stick did not exist.
As to how to frame the "left mega-corp to effect change" argument needs to be framed... Well, that's about it. Every smaller team I have had the privilege to work with has understood why I did.
I recently switched from startup to $ENTERPRISE and the thing I’m struggling with the most is time zones. My manager is 11 hours ahead and infrastructure/security change approvers are 6 hours behind.
Now add the big shift back to on-premises infrastructure and it’ll be impossible to get anything done.
Other empires besides the British (with plantations of manual QA) and the Egyptians (pyramids): the Mongols (ride in out of nowhere to bombard you with requirements and have ridden away before you figured out whether you actually need to deal with them or not), the Spanish (who insist that El Dorado isn't a fictious utopia of a project with full test coverage, full CI/CD, perfect monitoring, but will add every linter and bit of friction they can find to try to get there), the Japanese (who go to floors and campuses across the oceans to commit career suicide by yelling at random stakeholders that they have displeased The Emperor), the Chinese (their floors are always quiet, good luck finding your way through the Forbidden City of Zoom meetings without a map)...
Thanks for reading!
Great read, would love to hear more from you
Rationality as we humans see it doesn’t apply.
It's incredible how starting a family and hitting your 40s moves this bullet point to somewhere near the very top of priorities for work. For all the complaints I've had about work over the past few years, I always finish it with: "But the paychecks don't bounce."
Clock in in the morning, clock out in the evening. It's just a job (I repeat to myself like a mantra.)
It feels like there's very little commercial or technical juice, and very low standards. Frankly this became even more noticeable after the last wave of offshoring.
The "cloud sales" & "enterprise architecture" nexus has got a lot to answer for as well. There's an entire parallel ecosystem of people whose job is purely to sound impressive to non-technical stakeholders and then funnel money to AWS. Currently these guys are busy rebranding as "agentic systems" experts, just like they went from being OOP to microservices experts in the 2010s.
- Teams that produce negative output for years with no consequence
- Six figure monthly AWS bills on unused resources
- Technical people who can't use a computer
- Constant re-orgs and turn over
It is hell, but it pays. I get my fulfillment building my own things outside of work and dream of the day I can escape.
The only time this shifts is when I have a couple weeks off. During that period I will inevitably start some kind of project, but I have to keep it small, because I know it will die as soon as I start back to work again.
Are you a manager? Are you, personally, responsible for this stuff working or not working?
If not, don't let it hang over your head. You work at the circus with the monkeys, but they are not in any way meaningfully your circus or your monkeys.
In my experience, no one is willing to make decisions on what is actually a priority.
To channel Peter from Office Space, my only real motivation is to not be hassled.
In order not to burn out one has to start prioritizing other things higher than work, like your health or your hobbies. That means thinking: "someone wants this done and will hassle me for it, but I'm letting it go now."
Edit/addition: there will always be more things to be hassled about.
I think the difference is that different engineering team empires always push us to use their stuff, which then inevitably ends up being garbage.
Sure you'll get messages, but every one will be "quick call?"
I once had a boss who used to day, “got a second” every time he was pulling someone out to lay them off. He said it to me once and my stomach dropped… turned out he was just giving me my review. I told him to never say that to me again. He had no idea the entire team picked up on that phrase and it had a reputation.
This ends up a few outcomes, usually positive:
- They give up (pretty common)
- Writing it down helps them to answer the question themselves
- I can directly answer with a response or link to the relevant docs
- We have an actual agenda for the meeting they want to haveI get the text-based communication preference, but I’ll stand by calls being far more efficient sometimes.
That way, you get the benefits of higher bandwidth on the back and forth getting to those conclusions and then still get most or all of the benefits of written communication that you mention.
In my experience, the reason for most "quick calls" isn't quite this nefarious. It's usually just about making a request for which the asker wants immediate confirmation of handoff, and/or for which they haven't done much thinking or built a good justification, and they are proficient at controlling synchronous conversations to avoid questions and clarifications while still getting to yes.
/cynicism And, there are plenty of people out there who genuinely do prefer the personal touch and talking to others.
Startup people tend to neglect complexity and repeatedly underestimate the harm which comes as a result of 'cutting corners'. The hilarious thing is that once in a millennia, a hot startup like Facebook comes along and grows at such an incredible rate, that they can basically get away with cutting all corners... Proving the exception, not the rule; most startups who try this same approach invariably go out of business because it turns out that technical debt is actually very expensive; not every company can afford throwing hundreds of highly paid engineers at the problem of refactoring a code base over and over... Not every startup can afford to rewrite an entire PHP engine from scratch to achieve a modest speedup.
But the thing which is funny about this is that a startup like Facebook/Meta attracts so much attention that everyone is clamoring for their advice... Literally, everyone wants to take advice about reality from a company whose experience of reality is unlike that of any other company which has ever existed or will ever exist in the foreseeable future... I do believe that the average entrepreneur has more to learn about startups and software development from a bum on the streets of San Francisco than from a tech exec.
On top of that, the consultancy model dominates: endless "transformative" projects, pitched with buzzwords, costing upwards of $300,000 per month for an "agile squad" — usually 5–6 junior or mid-level developers rebranded as "senior." Value delivery is irrelevant because another part of the enterprise machine is dedicated to "protecting" budgets, ensuring they don't shrink year over year, and inflating headcount so managers can parade the size of their teams.
This creates the elephant-in-the-room effect: organizations that are slow, rigid, and performative rather than adaptive. In more than one company I've worked at, it was rare to find someone on a technology team who could even write a simple SQL query. But they were experts in "agility," microservices, and "scalability" — all while serving theie super systems/projetcs with a super number of 8 daily users and a mess of integrations with SAP, Salesforce, or whatever the enterprise flavor of the month happened to be.
With that I can say, it's frustrating, it's messy,full of political interactions, but it pays the bills, but it's still shit, maybe you decorate it a little here or there, but in the end it's just decorated shit.
How the world has captured so much potential, such an amazing era, and lashed it to this middling servitude is so sad. But it feels so impossible to try to begin better, the odds so stacked against us, the society about us so cowed and so FUD'ed up against "socialism" as to be unwilling to do anything to improve access to health care child care housing food and utilities. All ventures made available to the already wealthy.
Fuck enterprises, and worse, fuck this too scared world for being propagandized into cowardice that obstructs human spirit from being able to make a real go at better.
My solution was to just PICK UP THE PHONE and talk to the last person who had a commit in the version control system on that thing. Which worked fine until I tried calling an engineer in Elbownia, when I realized that part of what made offshoring so profitable was that this company, who made phones (and softphones) didn't even give phones to people outside of North America and Europe.
I can very much relate to this point. I once worked for a company which spent more each month than I could save in my entire career... And they basically did absolutely nothing with it... The same company offered me a 2% raise while saying that I was their top engineer and that me threatening to quit was akin to "holding a knife at the company's throat". I followed through on the threat, the company is still fine, still spending over $1 million per month, still achieving nothing... Meanwhile, I've been desperate to do my own startup ever since, built stuff that would put their puny systems to shame... and yet I never managed to earn above $1000 per month from my own projects.
>> Generational wealth being funnelled directly to Bezos's mega-yacht via AWS
My wife made a similar joke when she saw my recent AWS bill though it was about our contribution to Bezos' wife's massive diamond ring. My wife then said "We can't even afford to do my fillers" to which I responded "Meanwhile, she can afford so much fillers, there's barely any space left for her meat."
Then my wife laughed and said "You're funny, that's why I married you."
Just kidding, she laughed and said "You loser, when are you going to shut your mouth and start earning money?"
Why didn’t it fail the build before it was committed if they can automatically do this
Newsflash: yes small organizations are better solving small problems (like "small tool has broken feature X"). Everyone knows that and feels it "on their skin". But they cannot solve large/enormous problems. It's just physics: big problems -> big requirements. Think stuff along the lines of "getting to the moon" or "building the Chunnel". Myopic individuals, who are bound to only see and understand work within their own vicinity, necessarily will bemoan the existence of large organizations. This is why reading history is valuable - because it is indeed myopic.
Your examples of big projects are great, but the majority of enterprise companies are not sending people to the moon or building physical infrastructure. If you look at the top 20 companies in the United States by headcount, the majority of those companies are large because they require a physical presence all over the country (Walmart, Home Depot, Marriott). The largest company that does not require a physical presence is Cognizant. Has Cognizant ever made anything worth using?