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The magic of small engineering teams

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Re: The magic of small engineering teams

#51

Post by smackeyacky »

habitue wrote: post #10
tonyarkles wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's a great story of sticking through a really tough situation and figuring out how to make it work. Honestly most of these stories end with "it sucked and then I quit". Which, fair, but not as interesting

Most stories end that way because that is the only logical thing to do. Trying to fight an organisation with a terrible culture is a sisyphean task that consumes time and energy that could be spent making stuff.

Some organisations (like the one I'm working for) seem to be run like a dystopian daycare. Stay in your box, be "respectful", don't complain about your terrible manager, don't complain about the hoops you have to jump through to get even the most simple or meagre of resources. The internal communications are heavily monitored and that has a chilling effect on cross-team collaboration.

They have even weaponised their "culture" in a way that coddles the offending teams in the structure and still direct blame for missing deadlines at the victims rather than the perps.

There is no fighting this. My small team are all aggressively looking for new jobs which is a shame because they are a tight crew with great skills who have now been beaten down as far as they will go. A great loss to the organisation when we walk too, all that institutional knowledge gone.

Re: The magic of small engineering teams

#52

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp »

smackeyacky wrote: post #51
habitue wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great story of sticking through a really tough situation and figuring out how to make it work. Honestly most of these stories end with "it sucked and then I quit". Which, fair, but not as interesting

Most stories end that way because that is the only logical thing to do. Trying to fight an organisation with a terrible culture is a sisyphean task that consumes time and energy that could be spent making stuff. Some organisations (like the one I'm working for) seem to be run like a dystopian daycare. Stay in your box, be "respectful", don't complain about your terrible manager, don't complain about the hoops you hav…

Different strokes. For some people, the desire to “build stuff” extends to building (improving? refactoring?) the organisation. For some people, tech problems that are just tech problems is, creativity wise, like eating meatloaf through a straw. Myself included.

Re: The magic of small engineering teams

#53

Post by kortilla »

rqtwteye wrote: post #40
kortilla wrote: post #39

Earlier 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…

It’s well known that middle managers love to grow headcount. That doesn’t matter.

If teams aren’t resulting in profit, they’re gonna get pressured to make cuts or will have RIFs imposed on them. I’ve seen this happen at every company, even big seemingly inept monsters like Oracle and IBM.

Re: The magic of small engineering teams

#54

Post by whoknowsidont »

kortilla wrote: post #39
whoknowsidont wrote: post #14

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.

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.

>If the people weren’t providing some positive ROI then the execs

The majority, the vast majority, of executives are not capable of measuring this any way you slice it.

Re: The magic of small engineering teams

#55

Post by baumy »

vbezhenar wrote: post #31
goosejuice wrote: post #25

Earlier 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.

In a vacuum that's certainly the most pragmatic way to look at it. The problem is that tolerance of abuse tends to create more abuse, to the point that usually it's not a sustainable policy.

Re: The magic of small engineering teams

#56

Post by Kamq »

kortilla wrote: post #39
whoknowsidont wrote: post #14

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.

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.

Most people actually don't like firing people. Management, as weird as it may seem, actually is made up of people.

That's why layoffs don't happen until the market starts to get tight, but yeah, when the market's tight.

Re: The magic of small engineering teams

#57

Post by teaearlgraycold »

getcrunk wrote: post #35
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

How many number of hours is chill? 4? 6? 3?

5 or 6 most days. I’m of course happy to do more in sprints when duty calls. Working at 100% is fun - as an exercise. Like training with weights on. Maybe your site gets DDOS’d. Maybe your database has a critical issue. As long as you’ve done some prep these are recoverable issues. And solving big problems tells you and your boss that you’re important.

But honestly most of the time I’m able to take my best thinking hours of the day, put those into the job, and get 90% of the output with much less than 90% of the time. The worst thing you can to is try to fill the time and create a bunch of tech debt. Artificial time scarcity keeps things lean.

Re: The magic of small engineering teams

#59

Post by zeroonetwothree »

hdhshdhshdjd wrote: post #5

I think the inflection point between “startup” and “bureaucracy” (which is not a bad word, just a term for organizing people) is role specialization. Early stage everybody wears 10 hats, work is distributed and prioritized on a day to day basis. Once you have dedicated people or teams for task domains then the whole thing shifts to having a need for bureaucracy. You can slice the number of pizzas anyway you want, but…

I think “this isn’t my job” is generally a bad mentality (sure there are some times it’s ok, but those are like 1% of the actual times it’s used)
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