God, I hate the pizza as a unit of team size. It tells me nothing.
The magic of small engineering teams
41–50 of 161 posts
Re: The magic of small engineering teams
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not true. If the people weren’t providing some positive ROI then the execs would be drooling over the money saved from cutting them.
I don’t think so. Unless you get super high up, your pay increases proportionally to people under you. The next problem is that once you start cutting, you actually have to organize and manage. That’s way more difficult than saying “ I have hired x people”. I have been in countless discussions where management offered more people but whenever I told them the real problem is the process or another department not doing…
'i need more people' or 'i people with this specific skill' is also a really good blanket excuse for dysfunction. and if you dont get the slots you can just say 'i told you', and if you do get the slots and dont feel like actually executing, its pretty trivial to find all the candidates wanting. or blame the hiring market. or the low salaries. its a hugely effective dodge, and you can even convince yourself that you're doing all you can to address the problems in your organization - you just cant because of factors completely outside your control.
Re: The magic of small engineering teams
#43Counterpoint: 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).
This reminds me of a situation which I'll label "satellite office syndrome" - which is where a company has a large/dominant Head Office, and smaller regional offices which are in a permanent state of playing second-fiddle in terms of funding, attention, respect and company culture.
This is as true with products as with locations. For example, the people doing S3 at Amazon get everything they need, because that is a blockbuster product...and the people doing, oh I dont know, Greengrass IoT are waayyy down the totem pole even though it might be a perfectly profitable product.
Large orgs tend to have a Roman Empire feel to them for most of the people, most of the time. You're stuck out on the edge of the empire, minding Hadrian's Wall, proud to be a Roman but also far, far away from any influence over or interest from the Emperor. If you are lucky they leave you alone. Occasionally a missive arrives from Rome that you have to decipher and implement no matter whether it makes sense or not. Fun times.
Re: The magic of small engineering teams
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Typical thought leader dogma aside, using pizza as a metaphor for team size has always been silly to meaningless. An easy way to see it fall apart is to imagine a team that each eats 3-4 slices of pizza, or a team that only eats one slice each.
Yup, in NZ a two pizza team would average out to about three people I think. Are US pizzas giant?
We have lots of sizes of pizza. Though I think the type they mean are the sort ordered from chain places for large groups, so usually 14-16 inches (35-40cm) diameter cut into 8-12 slices.
Re: The magic of small engineering teams
#45God, I hate the pizza as a unit of team size. It tells me nothing.
isn't a pizza for one ?
Re: The magic of small engineering teams
#464-6 is reasonable but for I feel 5-8 is a bit more sustainable to add some redundancy- though that should include a technical lead who also serves as the manager (50-50) and ideally a product/program person who can maybe float between teams. It's also important that everyone is using the same standardized toolkit and shared infrastructure so each team doesn't invent their own ways of working or tooling. Some flexibility and experimentation is good but it should be clearly segmented until it's clear the innovations are worth the adoption and maintenance costs of both the 'new' and now 'legacy' system.
Re: The magic of small engineering teams
#47God, I hate the pizza as a unit of team size. It tells me nothing.
It’s an abstract measure that is somewhere between 2 and 10 people. It’s deliberately not supposed to be prescriptive
Re: The magic of small engineering teams
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is all too common due to a small few who take advantage which leads to the construction of barriers to prevent abuse. This isn't limited to large orgs -- it's everywhere in society. I suspect accountability without authority might not be as accurate as one might seem when there exists middle management. You might be accountable but your boss probably is more so, thus the reluctance in giving full autonom…
If barriers harm more than abuse then abuse should be accepted.
Reminds me of that bits about money blogpost title :
"The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero"
Re: The magic of small engineering teams
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why I only work at small startups. There are tradeoffs, but I'll never go back to big organizations.
Same. I quit Google to go work at a 4 person company. I love that we’re just able to get stuff done. Hard to get GPUs? Walk down to Central Computers in SOMA and buy L40S cards and build a workstation for everyone to share. I’m not very financially motivated. I’m already making more than 90+% of the US. I just can not fathom the level of greed I saw hiding behind people’s eyes at Google as they try to build empires.…
> I just can not fathom the level of greed I saw hiding behind people’s eyes at Google as they try to build empires.
That’s very well written. Poetic even.
> I’m in Silicon Valley to learn about and work with computers.
The industry used to be more like that. Never entirely, of course - Microsoft made a bunch of people millionaires in the 80s and 90s, turned some heads. A few others did too.
Even in the early 2000s almost none of the MBA types were going to the Bay Area after graduating.
But things changed. It basically had to. There were too many companies making too much money - and making their employees too wealthy - for people to ignore it. Zero interest rates added fuel to the fire and everyone who could jumped on it. Late stage capitalism, everyone gotta get theirs. And here we are.