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How some good corporate engineering blogs are written

I've been comparing notes with people who run corporate engineering blogs and one thing that I think is curious is that it's pretty common for my personal blog to get more traffic than the entire corp eng blog for a company with a nine to ten figure valuation and it's not uncommon for my blog to get an order of magnitude more traffic. I think this is odd because tech companies in that class often have hundreds to thousands of employees.

Unfortunately, it appears that the natural state of large corporations tends towards risk aversion and blocking people from writing, just in case it causes a legal or PR or other problem. Individual contributors (ICs) might have the opinion that it's ridiculous to block engineers from writing low-risk technical posts while, simultaneously, C-level execs and VPs regularly make public comments that turn into PR disasters, but ICs in large companies don't have the authority or don't feel like they have the authority to do something just because it makes sense. Thanks to Marek Majkowski, Kamal Marhubi, Calvin French-Owen, John Graham-Cunning, Michael Malis, Matthew Prince, Yuri Vishnevsky, Julia Evans, Wesley Aptekar-Cassels, Nathan Reed, Jake Seliger, an anonymous commenter, plus sources from the companies I didn't name for comments/corrections/discussion; none of the people explicitly mentioned in the acknowledgements were sources for information on the less compelling blogs

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