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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]

#31

Post by erikpukinskis »

maxxxxx wrote: post #23

I used to work in small teams/companies or alone and got a lot done that way. Now I am in a big corporation and I am still stunned by the overhead there . Between coordinating with other teams, dealing with offshore teams and reporting to management you barely get any work done. And if you get anything done it's usually mediocre because there is no room for experimentation or rapid change if something doesn't work. I…

> It seems the bigger a company gets the more they favor predictability over excellence.

This is because in a bigger company the owners can’t really influence individual contributors, they can only influence the managers, so they set up a culture of predictability by ICs so they can still maintain control.

In a small company the managing owners (founders, early employees, etc) can influence ICs directly.

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

#32

Post by jrs235 »

maxxxxx wrote: post #23

I used to work in small teams/companies or alone and got a lot done that way. Now I am in a big corporation and I am still stunned by the overhead there . Between coordinating with other teams, dealing with offshore teams and reporting to management you barely get any work done. And if you get anything done it's usually mediocre because there is no room for experimentation or rapid change if something doesn't work. I…

>It seems the bigger a company gets the more they favor predictability over excellence.

Or also the bigger a company gets the more they favor predictability over [early] delivery.

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

#33

Post by mmanfrin »

maxxxxx wrote: post #23

I used to work in small teams/companies or alone and got a lot done that way. Now I am in a big corporation and I am still stunned by the overhead there . Between coordinating with other teams, dealing with offshore teams and reporting to management you barely get any work done. And if you get anything done it's usually mediocre because there is no room for experimentation or rapid change if something doesn't work. I…

Even things as mundane as copy become multi-week ping-pong behemoths as 6+ different teams need to put in their two cents and tweek everything. Legal, copy, marketing, UX, product, exec. It's astounding how slow things move at large corporations.

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

#34

Post by aidenn0 »

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 why large teams are bureaucratic. Spending 2 hours a day filling out forms is a net time savings over sitting down for an average of 10 minutes each with 13+ people.

Now the data is organized, and anybody who needs it can get it on a pull basis. Some teams will have someone whose primary job is to triage information added and put the important stuff out in a daily update (making it "push" rather than "pull")

Hierarchy can also help; if you have mostly unrelated projects, then you have smaller groups that are more efficient.

The Linux kernel operates on a combination of these techniques; the mailing-list is non-pairwise, there's a significant amount of non-code information that goes along with any PR, and Linus doesn't even look at it until the subsystem maintainer has.

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

#35

Post by guelo »

maxxxxx wrote: post #23

I used to work in small teams/companies or alone and got a lot done that way. Now I am in a big corporation and I am still stunned by the overhead there . Between coordinating with other teams, dealing with offshore teams and reporting to management you barely get any work done. And if you get anything done it's usually mediocre because there is no room for experimentation or rapid change if something doesn't work. I…

A lot of it has to do with office politics power struggles. A small team with a lot of autonomy that produced a great result for the business could also step on the toes of a lot of ladder-climbing managers. So better to not let that happen.

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

#36

Post by SatvikBeri »

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…

I think some of the most successful big companies are ones that have figured out how to significantly reduce coordination costs. For example, Amazon's extreme insistence on small teams and coordinating through interfaces[0] seems like something that might make individual teams less productive, but cause coordination costs to scale linearly instead of quadratically. Similarly, Facebook has a ton of emphasis on decentralization.

This leads me to believe that at large companies, you should heavily prioritize decentralization and low coordination costs to the expense of almost anything else. One reason companies fail to do this is trying to avoid redundancy: having two teams work on the same thing seems like a waste. But if you need to add a communication node to avoid redundancy, that's often not worth it.

[0]: https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX

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

#37

Post by ebiester »

I have a mild critique of this: Small teams can get a lot done, and there certainly is a diminishing return per extra developer on any team, but most development isn't slow because it has too many people but rather the problem being solved has become large enough that a small group can't keep all of it in its head.

Eventually, those three programmers have built so much that even with their productivity, their entire time is spent on maintenance. Replace 3 with N programmers, especially understanding the diminishing returns.

Then take into account that if one experienced programmer leaves a small group, picking up that domain knowledge takes a significant amount of time. While having a team of 50 makes each engineer slower, it means that losing one or two isn't a company-altering event.

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

#38

Post by nostrademons »

maxxxxx wrote: post #23

I used to work in small teams/companies or alone and got a lot done that way. Now I am in a big corporation and I am still stunned by the overhead there . Between coordinating with other teams, dealing with offshore teams and reporting to management you barely get any work done. And if you get anything done it's usually mediocre because there is no room for experimentation or rapid change if something doesn't work. I…

"It seems the bigger a company gets the more they favor predictability over excellence."

In addition to the reasons other comments have pointed out, this is likely economically rational. If a startup does nothing, they die. If they do something but it's not excellent, they die. Thus they have a strong incentive to do something excellent even if they have to fail a lot of times beforehand.

Whereas a big company is already doing something that's working and bringing in billions. Just by regression to the mean, there's a good chance that anything additional they do will make things worse. So they have a strong incentive to be conservative and protect the golden goose rather than trying things that may work out well but have a chance of harming the brand or business.

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

#39

Post by g9yuayon »

Hot startups in Silicon Valleys should take notice. You know who hired hundreds to thousands of engineers in a year or two, when there were really not that many significant engineering challenges. Productivity and morale dropped after certain threshold. Chaos and unhealthy dose of politics ensued. Yeah, really fun stuff.

If we look back, Google made really good decisions in its early days. Founder's bill is a brilliant invention, thanks to Eric Schmidt

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

#40

Post by agumonkey »

hennsen wrote: post #16

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…

I wonder the same about pharmaceuticals too. And even in a way.. spacex did a similar thing.

Big ventures become superstitious, too many agents know a bit, nobody understands enough to move things. That's how it is in space or airplane. They live on a fragile thread, they can't afford to change things, the knowledge is in the product somehow, not in the employees.

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