The magic of small engineering teams • Hacker News Board

Re: The magic of small engineering teams

#11

Post by habitue » Sat, Jul 06, 2024, 7:15 PM UTC

This is interesting, because at 47 people they're in transitional scaling. Like they've had to solve "too many teams for the CTO to manage directly" but not "too many teams to align effectively".

At 15 strong self-directed teams, you can have a few teams focused on the high level directives, and a few entropy repair teams that mostly self-manage.

The way to think about it is maybe like homeostasis. Self-directed product teams will implement new features, fix bugs, and generally keep the thing on track, but the efficiency drops off as the feedback mechanisms of talking to customers reaches equilibrium.

To mix metaphors, a leadership team creates a kind of current flow in that system. When you're small you can go to each of those teams and ensure that current flow is happening.

But at a larger size, that doesn't work. You have to engineer and carefully craft the feedback mechanisms the teams are working off of to induce that current. This is a hard problem, but it's where things like minimum attrition policies, OKRs, etc spring from: leadership trying to have a policy that induces current.

Re: The magic of small engineering teams

#12

Post by BurningFrog » Sat, Jul 06, 2024, 7:29 PM UTC

tonyarkles wrote: post #4

psim1 wrote: post #2

Counterpoint: Being on a small team in a large organization sucks. In a large org, small teams have no weight. Actually, we have wait - we have to wait for everything: devops resources, marketing resources, even infosec resources. We are too small to notice, not important enough to get quick attention (never mind that our small team's product is profitable).

One of the most interesting discussions I've had around this was at a small company who mass-hired a bunch of people from a big company. We went round and round in circles for a while because of issues similar to what you're describing. I ran a small 4-6 person hardware team (softly blurry on the edges) and the new people wanted significant amounts of design and documentation review as well as financial oversight. We…

This is why I only work at small startups.

There are tradeoffs, but I'll never go back to big organizations.

Re: The magic of small engineering teams

#13

Post by r0ze-at-hn » Sat, Jul 06, 2024, 7:29 PM UTC

The author is writing about the common story of how to grow and scale. Each team gets a product, spinning off teams, etc. What if like most products there is a ramp up period where you need a full team (or teams) and then a few years later the product needs at most a fraction of the people to maintain the product? All of these people are going to "do stuff" because they are paid to do stuff further increasing the maintenance burden. You run head first into the common problem of:

"I have 1000 engineers and I can't get anything done!"

In the worst case the CEO solves this by doing lay offs. Been thinking about this problem for over a decade, making effective engineering organizations that can not only grow, but change shape is difficult, but can also be very rewarding when done successfully.

Re: The magic of small engineering teams

#14

Post by whoknowsidont » Sat, Jul 06, 2024, 7:30 PM UTC

Corporations are mostly just job programs. Most companies do not actually need anywhere near the number of people they have employed to function.

The reasons why small teams work is because the number of communication channels go down, and you spend less time simply talking about the work and actually doing the work.

Re: The magic of small engineering teams

#15

Post by malfist » Sat, Jul 06, 2024, 7:31 PM UTC

The whole section on managers rubbed me the wrong way. Team leads aren't managers and thus aren't responsible for onboarding, not communicating up the chain about perfomance, but is Responsible for performance of individuals on the team. And the phrasing about managers mostly care about happiness and team leads don't, makes me think this place might be very toxic to work for. Reeks of "brilliant jerk" acceptance and accountability without authority.

It also feels rich to have a 47 person company tell you they've figured out the secret sauce of people management and team formation.

Re: The magic of small engineering teams

#16

Post by drewcoo » Sat, Jul 06, 2024, 7:37 PM UTC

> Startups ship more per person than big companies – everyone knows this.

Startups can quickly change alignment to make the company work. They can throw more spaghetti at the wall to see when it's done.

> But how do you retain that advantage as you scale?

Once the company figures out what works, you'll want to put people and processes in place to keep it working. That means bureaucracy. That slows change. Intentionally.

In big commercial kitchens no one throws spaghetti at the wall. That's waste.

Re: The magic of small engineering teams

#17

Post by arjunlol » Sat, Jul 06, 2024, 7:54 PM UTC

This was particularly bad at Meta pre-efficiency push Zuck. There was huge bloat that was counterproductive. Empire builders were incentivized by promotions based on the size of their orgs.

One thing the article didn't mention is how crucial it is for a team to have focus and to ruthlessly prioritize. It's easier for bigger teams to fall into the trap of doing "busy work" and people fighting for scope on their performance reviews. This is the worst possible outcome for company and employee where you have work driven by optics vs value.

Re: The magic of small engineering teams

#18

Post by nextworddev » Sat, Jul 06, 2024, 8:10 PM UTC

arjunlol wrote: post #17

This was particularly bad at Meta pre-efficiency push Zuck. There was huge bloat that was counterproductive. Empire builders were incentivized by promotions based on the size of their orgs. One thing the article didn't mention is how crucial it is for a team to have focus and to ruthlessly prioritize. It's easier for bigger teams to fall into the trap of doing "busy work" and people fighting for scope on their perfor…

Empire building has gotten rejuvenated recently at faang due to people politicking to get the fancy AI projects

Re: The magic of small engineering teams

#19

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 06, 2024, 8:12 PM UTC

nextworddev wrote: post #18

arjunlol wrote: post #17

This was particularly bad at Meta pre-efficiency push Zuck. There was huge bloat that was counterproductive. Empire builders were incentivized by promotions based on the size of their orgs. One thing the article didn't mention is how crucial it is for a team to have focus and to ruthlessly prioritize. It's easier for bigger teams to fall into the trap of doing "busy work" and people fighting for scope on their perfor…

Empire building has gotten rejuvenated recently at faang due to people politicking to get the fancy AI projects

[deleted]

Re: The magic of small engineering teams

#20

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 06, 2024, 8:13 PM UTC

nextworddev wrote: post #18

arjunlol wrote: post #17

This was particularly bad at Meta pre-efficiency push Zuck. There was huge bloat that was counterproductive. Empire builders were incentivized by promotions based on the size of their orgs. One thing the article didn't mention is how crucial it is for a team to have focus and to ruthlessly prioritize. It's easier for bigger teams to fall into the trap of doing "busy work" and people fighting for scope on their perfor…

Empire building has gotten rejuvenated recently at faang due to people politicking to get the fancy AI projects

[deleted]