The Illusion of Work: Why Big Companies Drag While Startups Build

I work at an automobile company—one of India’s biggest bike brands. Its brand image among men and gentlemen is something else.

I’m in their tech team, more in an analyst or consultant role. The work here is slow, dragged out, or completely stalled because someone in the chain is delaying a deliverable. Their delay affects you, wastes your time and energy, and in the end, all the blame lands on you. This cycle repeats in different forms, making the whole process frustrating.

Now I get why startups with less than 30 employees are building apps used by millions. Many companies don’t actually have real work. They just assign accountability for things that barely matter, so you do them just for the sake of it. Startups, on the other hand, have real work—they put in actual hours. Well-established companies have a better balance—most days, there’s nothing to do, and on some days, you’re stuck waiting on some middle manager’s approval or deliverable.

There’s an insane amount of micromanaging, useless meetings, and pointless fillers just to stretch things until the final deadline written in some task scheduling app. The company I work for doesn’t even invest in proper enterprise software. They run everything on free, limited versions, and only the manager gets a single paid subscription. They barely use new tech and refuse to automate anything. Instead, they just do things slightly better for the next iteration, and the cycle keeps going. This results in endless discussions, meetings, and drama just to decide a single path forward.

When a company runs like this, it’s obvious that people will take shortcuts instead of building things to last or automating them for the future. For every single thing—DevOps, for example—there’s a group manager, then three managers under them, and then teams working under those managers. This structure creates endless meetings and unnecessary interference in everyone’s work.

At the end of the day, I don’t complain much. Their main product is a motorcycle, not tech. They’re expanding into mobile apps and digital services, but despite having a tech team for over five years, they’re still way behind. Their pay is way below market rates, and with the budget they have, they can’t attract better talent. Instead, they rely on vendor-hired candidates—people working as clients through other companies—which slows down innovation, automation, and growth. They claim they’re shifting their entire company toward tech in the next two years, but right now, the transition is barely moving.

Startups don’t have this problem. They run with two full-stack engineers, one DevOps guy, and a CTO. That’s enough to launch, scale, and even hit their first million users.

Honestly, I believe startups have killed more jobs than AI. This is the real trend I’ve observed over the years. Toxic work culture, 24/7 availability, extra pay for insane hours—that’s what’s eating jobs more than AI. Most startups aren’t outsourcing or building permanent teams from day one anymore because they know that the team is everything. A bad team is what kills most startups, and this shift has crushed many traditional service companies.