What ive learned in my career is that all companies are operating on a knife's edge

" Then, after I start I realize every company is operating on chaos, barely putting one foot in front of the other." So true. I have been involved in some projects where we had to figure out how certain processes. Every time it turned out that things are run on a mix of SAP, printed Excel sheets and some E-mails. Somehow it all (mostly) works out but nobody really knows how the company works.

I believe this describe most of the industry. Conferences about high performance teams and practices are wet dreams. If I'm wrong then I want to meet these teams.

The only one I've seen otherwise was one of the big banks. They were pretty well organised. They had relatively low productivity expectations for developers because they had nailed eveything down in terms of network security and legal compliance, but they accounted for that and expected it. It may come from them having no shortage of funds, I suppose, and as a result no shortage of staff, skills and time to throw at things.

That's kind of re-assuring, it means nobody has some secret huge advantage over their competitors. (Well it's not re-assuring for me riding in a Boeing plane.) I guess it's some combo of the Efficient Market Hypothesis and "Every complex system is always running in a broken state" ( https://how.complexsystems.fail/#5 )

Most companies I’ve worked for in 20 years doing this were a mess in one way or another, but also generally delivered an acceptable if inconsistent outcome. I’ve had a few brief spells at companies in their “golden days”, where it just sings. Every once in a while there’s plenty of budget because the product market fit is hand-in-glove, and the first people set an aggressive but achievable bar for quality, and a mentoring culture emerged, and leadership still knew their trade. That’s a quarter of my career at best, but it’s the stuff you remember.

What made IBM worse to me than the rest of the industry was the crazy crunch/burnout culture both in my project and utilization-wise. Also the absolute insanity of putting fresh out of college juniors on major aspects of multi-million euro projects. They also seem to have zero organizational understanding of modern requirements engineering even though they talk a big buzzword game with "Design Thinking". Suffice it to say, I didn't stay long.

I second this. When you think about it it’s a fallacy of the ideal to assume some non-trivial assemblage of humans would be able to be in perfect harmony with each other. That fiction of perfect execution of godlike companies is really a youthful impression when all your exposure is slick marketing campaigns, Hollywood movie representations and other artifacts that a company generates that enter the public square. When you see how the sausage is made it’s a shock to all who get to see behind the veneer. Once you get over it you’re a lot more forgiving for anything that doesn’t meet one’s unsubstantiated expectations because as they say life is hard.

I’ve come to the same conclusion. But not just about companies, but everything. Talk to someone in the military, or government agencies, or working on large infrastructure projects. It’s the same story everywhere - chaos. And it’s generally not because of malice, being dumb, or lack of trying. I think as a civilization we’re much more like ants than a troop of smart chimps. In that our civilization is a kind of a proverbial emergent anthill. And most likely the relative individual understanding of our respective anthills doesn’t differ too much between ants and us. And it’s kind of freeing. You just move your proverbial bit of earth that you’re just compelled to put somewhere else, and don’t stress the rest. Emergence will take care of it.