Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The magic of small engineering teams

newsletter.posthog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 161 posts

Re: The magic of small engineering teams

#61

Post by whoknowsidont »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #37
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.

Or perhaps corporations grow large because they serve diverse needs. Much like users only need 10% of Microsoft Word, yet many cohorts often need a different 10% slice. Or we lack anti-trust controls, so rent seekers are soaking up markets. Maybe a combination of all three.

>Maybe a combination of all three.

Likely. How big each "slice" is would be good to know. I wish someone would study it in depth, if it's even possible to fairly analyze.

I don't necessarily think your analogy with MS word is a fair or correct one, FWIW, only because once you build something the functionality is able to be distributed and replicated.

Employees require active up keep in a way that software really doesn't.

Re: The magic of small engineering teams

#63

Post by tonyarkles »

BurningFrog wrote: post #12
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…

This is why I only work at small startups. There are tradeoffs, but I'll never go back to big organizations.

Heh, it was a small startup. And then there was a $x0 million seed round and suddenly we became a much larger startup. When we hired a bunch of business/management-type people who had all worked together at another organization they imported their broken culture. (We were able to hire all of them because their previous organization had had a significant layoff... and for the record I had nothing to do with their hiring, they all just kinda showed up one day)

Re: The magic of small engineering teams

#64

Post by tonyarkles »

goosejuice wrote: post #25
al_borland wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of stuff drives me nuts. I just spent 8 months fighting to get $150 for something. This should have just been taken out of some petty cash fund, but instead I wasted a ton of my time, and others, fighting to get it from the proper source. This cost the organization thousands of dollars in lost time.

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…

> when there exists middle management

That was the most interesting thing about this. I still reported to the CEO directly, but some of his tasks had been delegated to finance and project management teams. So the project management folks were running their MS Project models and I had to keep them updated weekly on where everything was at, and if I spent money out-of-pocket without having it pre-approved by finance my expense claim would be denied.

Re: The magic of small engineering teams

#65

Post by tonyarkles »

cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #52
smackeyacky wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, that definitely played a part in it. I was employee #2 and had built an absolutely amazing culture in the team that I ran. I stuck it out in large part because I loved how well we worked together. The project was cool, too, which helped, but not wanting to abandon the team of fantastic young engineers I'd pulled together was the thing that kept me fighting.

I semi-jokingly-but-not explained to them what a Shit Umbrella was and that while all of this was going down I regretted not being as available to them as I had been, but that I was doing my best to give them an environment where they could keep doing the amazing work they'd been doing without getting dragged too much into the bog with me.

Re: The magic of small engineering teams

#66

Post by safety1st »

daydream wrote: post #49
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.…

> 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 a…

The most frustrating part of working in the tech industry for me is that when it was smaller, it was a given that you would work with people who loved the tech. Now the industry is filled with people who are "in tech" but have no real interest in the technology itself, and in many cases aren't even slightly technical. They're just doing it for the money and because everyone told them it was a good field to go into.

There's so many of these people that it's really hard to avoid working with some of them. I consider myself extremely lucky because I started a business and when these people show up, I can choose not to promote them, or straight up fire them, or find some other way to show them the door. But the broader ecosystem we're in is something I have no control over, and it has clearly changed, so that it's not just filled with people who don't know or care about the tech, it's run by them (and in the long term it shows as the tech degrades).

Re: The magic of small engineering teams

#68

Post by SoftTalker »

baumy wrote: post #55
vbezhenar wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Random audits can put enough fear into people to keep them honest for much lower cost.

Re: The magic of small engineering teams

#69

Post by teaearlgraycold »

safety1st wrote: post #66
daydream wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

The most frustrating part of working in the tech industry for me is that when it was smaller, it was a given that you would work with people who loved the tech. Now the industry is filled with people who are "in tech" but have no real interest in the technology itself, and in many cases aren't even slightly technical. They're just doing it for the money and because everyone told them it was a good field to go into. T…

> I consider myself extremely lucky because I started a business

If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. That goes for hiring and culture in addition to technical implementations.

Re: The magic of small engineering teams

#70

Post by hdhshdhshdjd »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #59
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)

I mean this in the broad sense: like asking somebody in the sales department to lead a mission-critical database migration. That is in no way their job.
Post reply on HN