Mmmh, you write so much that it would be easy to write you
off as crazy lunatic (as some here do for sure). But you amassed crazy Karma in just 2 years and I very much agree with your last two blog posts, so I'll give you the benefit of my doubt. Also this comment about Excel is spot-on.
I think mediocrity is a function of the risk your company is willing to take. The more risk-averse, the more mediocre. I don't have data to back this up, but I'd bet dollars to donuts there's a correlation between risk-aversion and company size. For example, here's a speech by a guy working for IBM during days they were developing the PC explaining his gripe with the organization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbRmaIzGTOM#t=5m55s
My thoughts: there's good risk and bad risk and, in the technological economy, you need to know the difference.
Good risk: trusting smart people with their own time. Don't take this risk and you will fucking fail because everyone with an IQ over 125 will sabotage you (or, at least, abandon you for better things.)
Bad risk: not backing up your database, skimping on code correctness in safety-critical code, playing with guns.
People who don't know the difference should not be making decisions that affect other people.
Mediocrity != average. The average MIT CS grad student isn't mediocre, but even above-average corporate cultures (e.g. Google, which is legitimately top-20%) are mediocre.
I feel like mediocrity (as a pejorative) is an artifact of a convex performance function where excellence is 10x as potent as a half-assed performance, as opposed to concave work where it's 1.2x. We don't gripe about cab drivers doing "mediocre" work. We ask them to take us somewhere and if they do it, we're usually happy.
[ETA: I realize I didn't answer your question. The reason corporate mediocrity is evil is that it's an artifact of the wrong people making decisions. If you wish to excel, you'll make a real effort to listen to people and get the right ideas into implementation. But a lot of companies tolerate executive bikeshedding because they don't care about excellence.]
Most people pay lip service to excellence, but what they really want is consistency. In a corporation, a career developer that works his 40 hours and consistently delivers uninspired but clean and correct code is more valuable than one rockstar that creates a brilliant system in one weekend and spends the rest of the month burned out.
it would be easy to write you off as crazy lunatic (as some here do for sure).
Only the 10 or so Google trolls.
But you amassed crazy Karma in just 2 years and I very much agree with your last two blog posts, so I'll give you the benefit of my doubt. Also this comment about Excel is spot-on.
