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It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]

#11

Post by Edmond »

pixelpoet wrote: post #5

I'm part of a 3-man company, Glare Technologies, and we develop and market two products: a high end 3D renderer with plugins for several 3D modelling apps, and a fractal art application. We do basically everything, from the online store and website to the coding and support emails. We've been fully independent since the beginning, around 2010. When I hear about the development world out there, especially in America,…

There is value in growing, you guys will probably grow faster if you had more people doing more things aligned with your growth objective...The problem is that as you grow the human factor comes into play, people are people and have their own agendas, it is a challenging problem to tackle.

Re: It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]

#12

Post by doh »

I believe this is why Jeff Bezos has the two pizzas rule [0].

Anecdotally, to this day we get surprised reactions (mostly by investors) when they learn that our massive service [1] was built by 6 engineers. More people requires more synchronizing, which leads to more meetings and results to more time waste.

[0] https://lifehacker.com/follow-jeff-bezos-two-pizza-rule-for-...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13726224

Re: It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]

#13

Post by TeMPOraL »

cs702 wrote: post #8

Say the cost in time/money/resources of coordinating between any two individuals is on average x dollars. Let's call this figure pair coordination cost. The pair coordination cost between 3 individuals, ignoring overhead, is 3x dollars, as there are three possible pairs that need to coordinate, i.e., there are three connections in a network with three nodes. The pair coordination cost between 4 individuals, ignoring…

This is, incidentally, the formalization of my intuition about bureaucracies and general organizational efficiencies[0] - basically, organizational inefficiency comes almost entirely from coordination costs. This is why government organizations are inefficient (way too many stakeholders), why big companies tend to be about as bureaucratic as governments, and while small governmental projects are much less efficient than small private project (because "small" government ops still has lots of non-obvious stakeholders that come from accountability requirements).

--

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16205338

Re: It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]

#14

Post by suryamp »

aidenn0 wrote: post #6

Medium teems seem worse than both large and small teams. With non-small teams, you need formal communications channels, which adds significant overhead. With a medium team, this eats up most, if not all, of the extra productivity you get by having more people than a large team. There are some things that you just can't get done with a small team, and then a large team is needed, but at a much higher cost.

Yeah, I agree that there is definitely a productivity dip as a team grows in size.

Re: It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]

#15

Post by zwieback »

cs702 wrote: post #8

Say the cost in time/money/resources of coordinating between any two individuals is on average x dollars. Let's call this figure pair coordination cost. The pair coordination cost between 3 individuals, ignoring overhead, is 3x dollars, as there are three possible pairs that need to coordinate, i.e., there are three connections in a network with three nodes. The pair coordination cost between 4 individuals, ignoring…

This doesn't reflect my experience working in large teams. Usually there's some amount of cost devoted to managing (e.g. a dedicated manager, processes, etc.) the overhead of a larger group of individuals.

Poorly managed projects (usually) collapse if the cost becomes higher than the benefit

Re: It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]

#16

Post by hennsen »

Actually, it’s surprising how much less bigger companies with much more manpower and funds can get done. As a freelancer i‘ve come to the point where especially enterprise projects and their various productivity limiting factos bore me to death and i avoid them regardless good pay. I simply have no joy being unable to achieve anything and surrounded and/or managed by people who seem not to care that a 100 heads team gets done 1/10 of what a 5 heads team can achieve in terms of functionality in software...

Re: It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]

#17

Post by itsdrewmiller »

cs702 wrote: post #8

Say the cost in time/money/resources of coordinating between any two individuals is on average x dollars. Let's call this figure pair coordination cost. The pair coordination cost between 3 individuals, ignoring overhead, is 3x dollars, as there are three possible pairs that need to coordinate, i.e., there are three connections in a network with three nodes. The pair coordination cost between 4 individuals, ignoring…

This concept is covered in depth in The Mythical Man Month; not exactly a #slatepitch but I recommend it.

(It's even explained in the wikipedia article about the concept in the book - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month )

Re: It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]

#18

Post by hencq »

cs702 wrote: post #8

Say the cost in time/money/resources of coordinating between any two individuals is on average x dollars. Let's call this figure pair coordination cost. The pair coordination cost between 3 individuals, ignoring overhead, is 3x dollars, as there are three possible pairs that need to coordinate, i.e., there are three connections in a network with three nodes. The pair coordination cost between 4 individuals, ignoring…

Yep, sociotechnical theory uses the same insight to design work so that people have complex tasks in simple organizations. Unfortunately most companies insist on doing the opposite and they create complex organizations with simple tasks.

Re: It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]

#19

Post by cs702 »

itsdrewmiller wrote: post #17
cs702 wrote: post #8

Say the cost in time/money/resources of coordinating between any two individuals is on average x dollars. Let's call this figure pair coordination cost. The pair coordination cost between 3 individuals, ignoring overhead, is 3x dollars, as there are three possible pairs that need to coordinate, i.e., there are three connections in a network with three nodes. The pair coordination cost between 4 individuals, ignoring…

This concept is covered in depth in The Mythical Man Month; not exactly a #slatepitch but I recommend it. (It's even explained in the wikipedia article about the concept in the book - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month )

Yes. I know :-) I wanted to convey the idea quickly for those who are unfamiliar with it.

Re: It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]

#20

Post by 0xfeba »

doh wrote: post #12

I believe this is why Jeff Bezos has the two pizzas rule [0]. Anecdotally, to this day we get surprised reactions (mostly by investors) when they learn that our massive service [1] was built by 6 engineers. More people requires more synchronizing, which leads to more meetings and results to more time waste. [0] https://lifehacker.com/follow-jeff-bezos-two-pizza-rule-for-... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13…

At my last company two pizzas would be eaten by any two people, myself included.

At my current company, they'd have to order 2 vegetarian, 2 gluten free, 2 plain cheese, 2 pepperoni and then for some reason 1 anchovy pizza that nobody would even touch. And it would take a meeting just to figure out the pizza order for the other meeting. Then another meeting to discuss who needs to go to that meeting.

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