It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio] • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by bpchaps » Wed, Jan 24, 2018, 11:46 PM UTC

jbob2000 wrote: post #56

josephorjoe wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 meetin…

On the flip side, when I worked at a small company, I felt like I had waaayyy to much power over the success/failure of the business. Yes, I can make an impact, but that impact could be negative; "If I fail, so does the whole company" was a common thought I had, it kept me up at night. At a larger company, I can fail repeatedly and the machine will have my back. I find I am taking more risks at a larger company becau…

Why not both? You can have interesting hobbies and an interesting job. For the same reason you should invest in a good bed in that it's a third of your life, you should invest in a job that interests you. Whether it's interesting is entirely up to you.

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

#72

Post by hinkley » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 12:23 AM UTC

crdoconnor wrote: post #44

SatvikBeri wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's easier to take or give a responsibility to a team when those responsibilities are small.

If you have a team in charge of a monolith you are screwed. You can't afford to fire them, even if they deserve it.

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

#73

Post by maxxxxx » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 1:15 AM UTC

jbob2000 wrote: post #56

josephorjoe wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 meetin…

On the flip side, when I worked at a small company, I felt like I had waaayyy to much power over the success/failure of the business. Yes, I can make an impact, but that impact could be negative; "If I fail, so does the whole company" was a common thought I had, it kept me up at night. At a larger company, I can fail repeatedly and the machine will have my back. I find I am taking more risks at a larger company becau…

"My job is not the place to do interesting things (though I am stimulated by the problems we have, even though they aren't always technical), that's what hobbies and free time are for. "

In my current job the workload is high but the work is often not very interesting or challenging. If I spend my whole day on boring stuff I am exhausted in the evening.

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

#74

Post by jbn » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 1:39 AM UTC

hencq wrote: post #18

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.

This is so well put, I'm going to bookmark this. This is so very true

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

#75

Post by erikpukinskis » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 1:59 AM UTC

Swizec wrote: post #59

mmanfrin wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then again copy that changes conversions by 0.0005% can mean a multimillion dollar difference for some companies. So it’s kinda important.

Adding one conversion in 200,000? How much data would you need to even show such an effect?

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

#76

Post by iamdave » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 2:00 AM UTC

bpchaps wrote: post #71

jbob2000 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side, when I worked at a small company, I felt like I had waaayyy to much power over the success/failure of the business. Yes, I can make an impact, but that impact could be negative; "If I fail, so does the whole company" was a common thought I had, it kept me up at night. At a larger company, I can fail repeatedly and the machine will have my back. I find I am taking more risks at a larger company becau…

Why not both? You can have interesting hobbies and an interesting job. For the same reason you should invest in a good bed in that it's a third of your life, you should invest in a job that interests you. Whether it's interesting is entirely up to you.

This question doesn't deserve the downvotes its getting.

Some people can and want a job that feels like a hobby, but some people like to compartmentalize and want their job to definitely be engaging, but don't necessarily want that love affair hobby becoming a career. My last career was like this, I loved doing it as a hobby and thought I could parlay it into a career. More than 10 years later I hated it and was running at full-sprint for the door.

But I definitely understand that some people can make this work, and make it work phenomenally. Some people just don't want that level of overlap.

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

#77

Post by megablast » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 2:58 AM UTC

corpMaverick wrote: post #60

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 number of things at play on large organizations. - They think in terms of projects not products. - The structure of the organization ifself. Doesn't lend it self to small teams. - A lot of dependencies. A lot of bottlenecks. You have to wait in line to get any of the resources that you need. - A lot of people offering their opinions. - Office politics. - Ratio between employees that can use office (e.g.power point,…

And lots of business people who have nothing to do but make meetings. Meetings get boring when they are only meeting with themselves, since they have nothing to talk about but there other meetings.

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

#78

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 3:08 AM UTC

maxxxxx wrote: post #73

jbob2000 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side, when I worked at a small company, I felt like I had waaayyy to much power over the success/failure of the business. Yes, I can make an impact, but that impact could be negative; "If I fail, so does the whole company" was a common thought I had, it kept me up at night. At a larger company, I can fail repeatedly and the machine will have my back. I find I am taking more risks at a larger company becau…

"My job is not the place to do interesting things (though I am stimulated by the problems we have, even though they aren't always technical), that's what hobbies and free time are for. " In my current job the workload is high but the work is often not very interesting or challenging. If I spend my whole day on boring stuff I am exhausted in the evening.

[deleted]

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

#79

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 3:15 AM UTC

secabeen wrote: post #22

TeMPOraL wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Government organizations also have an obligation to make many of their services available to everyone, without discrimination, whereas companies can choose to ignore portions of the market (unless it's a protected class) that cost more to service than the value gained.

[deleted]

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

#80

Post by hamandcheese » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 3:35 AM UTC

josephorjoe wrote: post #42

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 meetin…

I find that there’s a good chance that I can safely ignore any “ACTION REQUIRED” email from anyone not my manager. So I do. Occasionally my manager gets a nastygram to relay to me, but he is super okay with that if it means I’m focused and productive.