> Startups ship more per person than big companies
Are they?
Apple revenue per engineer is $2.4M. It seems hard to beat.
The magic of small engineering teams
111–120 of 161 posts
Re: The magic of small engineering teams
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of this comes down to budgets - those 10 people have a fixed salary so there is no visible cost.
Those costs should be made visible as they are real. The price of each meeting should be included in the agenda.
Have you seen this done anywhere? I have to wonder if it would even have any impact
Re: The magic of small engineering teams
#113> Startups ship more per person than big companies Are they? Apple revenue per engineer is $2.4M. It seems hard to beat.
They don't generate more per person but a startup is definitely going to put out more features and quickly..
Re: The magic of small engineering teams
#114> Startups ship more per person than big companies Are they? Apple revenue per engineer is $2.4M. It seems hard to beat.
Features shipped != revenue != revenue per engineer != profit
Corporations optimise for profit.
Apple took 2 years to introduce the clipboard to iOS (then "iPhone OS"), and 14 years to port their own calculator to iPad.
Re: The magic of small engineering teams
#115I'm a fan of small teams also - but slowing down as the company scales is unavoidable. > Startups ship more per person than big companies – everyone knows this. But how do you retain that advantage as you scale? You can't! Not really. If you could, we would see companies doing it but...we don't (barring some yet undiscovered engineering process). Everything you ship, by definition, has an ongoing maintenance cost. Th…
> Even this post makes this mistake by referring to "data warehouse" and "analytics" as "products". But customers don't care about your data warehouse or your job pipeline.
Depending on the part of the software industry you are in, customers might care very much about data warehouse or analytics products. Particularly, those products are highly important in the ERP area.
Re: The magic of small engineering teams
#116Earlier 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 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.
When I've run into this, I've gone and bought what I need with my own money. Then I make sure my boss knows, so that it becomes a story that gets repeated up the management chain.
Even if nothing changes, it still has therapeutic value.
Re: The magic of small engineering teams
#117I never really understood the "pizza" metric. Why not just state the range instead?. Two pizzas can "feed" a lot of people (perhaps 16 - 20 even) if they aren't very hungry, aren't very big or aren't very young.
Numbers are hard to remember, but pizza is easy to remember
Re: The magic of small engineering teams
#118> Startups ship more per person than big companies Are they? Apple revenue per engineer is $2.4M. It seems hard to beat.
What does revenue got to do with producing/shipping products? maybe you quoted the wrong sentence?
You can have millions of dollars in revenue without producing anything, on the other hand, you can also provide a lot of services and products for free
Re: The magic of small engineering teams
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a very common problem in many orgs. Spending time (adding meetings, exploring various options, etc.) is completely fine while spending money is a huge deal because of the emotional connection to money that many people seem to have. Imagine, holding a 2 hour, 10 person meeting to decide if an additional one time $1000 cloud expenditure is warranted. Yet, this happens all the time. I can assure you, that this i…
I work in embedded. When I told my boss I was leaving he asked what the other company was offering me - compiler licenses. Without enough each firmware build took 40-60 minutes. With enough, 10 minutes.
hey! would love to hear your experience about this. we’re building a system that should help alleviate this pain when developing embedded systems. emails / cal link are within my person site on bio!
Re: The magic of small engineering teams
#120Small teams work very very well if the team is full of competent people. Such a small team will execute much faster. The problem is that if you need to do more work at some point a small team won't be sufficient and you will end up hiring more. And as you hire more you will inevitably have quality dilution. Both communication in large team size and hiring issues make large teams much less effective.
Communication is the productivity killer. Where before you could have three people spend 95% of their time doing and 5% coordinating, as the number of people goes up, the amount of coordination blows up geometrically. you spend most of your time discussing and very little actually gets done.