When you have a large company that recruits in large part on comp, perks, security, and prestige, over time that will destroy the company culture no matter how good it was at the start. Because you're gonna attract bland, boring, competent but mediocre people by recruiting on those things, and their mid-tier mindsets will gradually pollute and dilute everything that might have been remarkable about the place in the e…
Let's say you work for one of these companies - how do you tell whether you are one of the good ones or one of the "bland, boring, competent but mediocre" ones? And are there any companies out there right now that are still chock full of good people?
It is not that uncommon for the first step in success to be forgetting about what the company ostensibly exists to do to make room for the misaligned incentives, whatever they may be, that determine what it actually does. That's the essential element of the big company malaise. Anyone can be mediocre if they're not trying, or if they're trying extremely hard to do something that's ultimately pointless.