I'm writing a story about rival tech companies and need some help researching the logistics of how these companies are run. Things like company hierarchy, departments, how projects are conceived and developed etc. I understand that most of these things will depend on the size, focus, and location of the companies. The image I have in my head so far is that they're well-known, national organisations based in the US. Does anyone have any idea about this? Or could you possibly direct me to a source where I could find this information? I know I'm being quite vague but any help would be appreciated.
Can you give a specific company that would fit your model? Tech company is very vague. I'm a developer with a medium length resume. I've probably either worked for, worked with, or outsourced to a company you have in mind, but different things are organized differently. Data centers work differently from development groups. Small businesses also run differently than large ones. The big ones are mostly public ally traded companies and you can research their internal structure directly. Small companies like what I usually work for usually have a barebones staff. You have the regular business directors: CEO who is usually also the owner who makes business deals and leads the vision, then a CFO for handling money, COO for directing the finer points of what needs to be done. Then a bunch of managers for whatever teams they have: R&D, QA, sales, customer service... each of those work differently too. QA is very top down where the manager assigns tasks, R&D is very bottom up where the managers say what needs to be done and the devs say how and how long. QA and service aren't always in house and often contracted to Asia.
Thank you - this was exactly the information I needed. The breakdown of big vs small companies makes sense, and using an existing company as a model to build my fictional one is a good point. I'm going to start there.
