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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]

#41

Post by pseudonom- »

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 one of the key themes of the book "Seeing Like a State". It describes many efforts by states to regularize their populace and make it "legible".

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

#42

Post by josephorjoe »

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…

I went from a big company to a small (The biggest contributors to that 20% are (1) extra admin overhead like time consuming performance appraisals and more red tape for purchases, reimbursements, time off, etc., (2) getting blocked sitting around waiting for some person/team whose priorities are not my priorities to respond to requests for info/support, and (3) additional reporting requirements in the form of meetings and extra emails/paperwork to keep other groups/managers updated on what I/my team am/is doing.

There is also a subtle productivity drain caused by the feeling of "why should I put in an extra hour today to finish this feature when release is probably going to be blocked by [some thing I cannot control]". So, I leave the work til tomorrow, but I lose all the mental context I have for the work and need to recapture that to get back to where I was, so what would have taken an hour yesterday takes 90 minutes today.

When I was on a 4 person team in a 25 person company, it absolutely felt like every extra effort I made had an impact and was noticed and appreciated, which inspired me to make extra efforts.

Now I feel like any extra energy I have should go into making sure I don't forget to get some form to HR by some important (but arbitrary) deadline or attending the latest mandatory training session my manager or IT has required me to go to or getting legal to approve use of that open source library we need.

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

#43

Post by twblalock »

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.

That's also what their customers tend to prefer -- they are often large companies themselves, and they can't drop everything to deal with a breaking change introduced by a vendor. They expect stuff that works to continue to work, and they expect breaking changes to be communicated far in advance so they can make plans to deal with them. That's part of what they are paying for.

What you see as mediocrity is a feature of big companies, not a bug. You can't make all the decisions in a project yourself and expect all of the affected stakeholders and customers to go along with it. Their concerns are often valid and need to be addressed because the project has an impact on the business that other teams don't know about.

Star developers at large companies are the ones who build and manage relationships effectively, so they can deliver on projects that have a big impact on the bottom line, and also do high-quality programming work. If you can do this, you can achieve a lot more with the resources of a large company than you could at a small one.

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

#44

Post by crdoconnor »

SatvikBeri wrote: post #36
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 decentr…

I think this is why microservices "work" (when they work) despite being a suboptimal approach technically. It's a fairly straightforward way to loosely couple team deliverables.

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

#45

Post by nostrademons »

indubitable wrote: post #21
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…

It's sometimes interesting to pose a little thought experiment to somebody about what they think they could get done if they had 10 world class developers and practically unlimited resources - certainly the ability to hire or acquired almost anybody or anything within some degree of reason. What could they get done in 10 years? Now multiply that by ~2,000. That's, roughly, the sort of resources Google has had. Kind o…

That thought experiment was why I joined Google after 4 years of working in startups. The communication cost overhead the grandparent mentioned is why I left Google after 5 years.

While there, I observed a lot of projects where I was literally working with a room full of world-class people - folks who had given TED talks, folks who had started major open-source projects, folks who had written the "Bible" of their particular subfield of computing - and the final design we came up with was worse than what any one person in the room, working on their own, could've come up with. Good designs tend to be both controversial and coherent: they take a position, not everyone agrees with the position, but they do it anyway because self-consistency has its own benefits that are often intangible but highly valued by users. When you design by compromise, you end up sanding off all the most innovative (= hard to communicate) parts of the design, and end up with only the bare minimum that everyone can agree on.

It's interesting that when you put a bunch of average people in a group, have them independently make a prediction, and then average the predictions, you end up with a result more accurate than any one participant's prediction. When you put a bunch of really smart people in a group, have them cooperate to make a design, and look at the design, you end up with a design that's worse than any one expert's original design.

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

#46

Post by mrep »

guelo wrote: post #35
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.

Politics is so annoying. My team had a multi week partial outage that could have been solved in a day if we got VP approval or a few days if we got director approval and my managers spent days going back and forth on what to do delaying the resolution even further.

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

#47

Post by felideon »

amelius wrote: post #29

Yes, that's why small startups can be disruptive. But ... big companies have figured this out too, so the good days may be numbered.

Not sure what you are alluding to, but I'm not sure pseudo-startups within a larger corporation have proven to be successful. Are there any examples?

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

#48

Post by regularfry »

ebiester wrote: post #37

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…

In my experience, "the problem being solved" can very easily be "how can we have 120 developers committing to this code base without going insane" and that's the only hard part.

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

#49

Post by mattmanser »

twblalock wrote: post #43
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. That's also what their customers tend to prefer -- they are often large companies themselves, and they can't drop everything to deal with a breaking change introduced by a vendor. They expect stuff that works to continue to work, and they expect breaking changes to be communicated far in advance so they can make plans to deal wit…

I think this is only partially true. For example my client just added a huge chunk of functionality which is generating a lot of interest and will definitely lead to some nice sales.

Took me 2 months solo developing it. I basically looked at the competition, picked out the key features and made it, with little direction. I only really discussed what we should leave out due to cost/benefit ratio with the CEO, and it was usually him just agreeing.

I know of another larger company that could have made exactly the same functionality, but would talk about a team of 5 taking 2 years to do the same thing. Admittedly I have analyst skills as well as Dev skills and lots of experience, but that's still crazy to me.

That's not mediocrity winning for customer stability, that's being unable to react to the market.

Larger companies are realising this is a huge weakness and I've seen stories here of them setting up mini-teams given huge leeway to get stuff done.

Also look at gov.uk and the American equivalent that are transforming what were terrible portals with small nimble teams.

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

#50

Post by fleitz »

twblalock wrote: post #43
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. That's also what their customers tend to prefer -- they are often large companies themselves, and they can't drop everything to deal with a breaking change introduced by a vendor. They expect stuff that works to continue to work, and they expect breaking changes to be communicated far in advance so they can make plans to deal wit…

Nah, it's just that large companies have a lot of smaller companies inside it losing money.

Without the safety net of the larger company these companies would go bankrupt in the real world and not exist.

Star developers mostly have figured out which teams are / are not going bankrupt and direct their internal business to those teams / figure out how to couch a problem in terms that make it seem like it should be given to a team not going bankrupt.

eg. If your web team is shit, but app team is rock stars then the UI should be an app, to prevent the web team from getting the job add a feature such as something with the camera/gps that makes it feel app ish.

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