It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio](blog.ycombinator.com)
blog.ycombinator.com
It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]
https://blog.ycombinator.com/its-surprising-how-much-small-teams-can-get-done-sam-chaudhary-of-classdojo/
96 comments
I went from a big company to a small (<30 person) company and back to a big company, and I'd put my personal productivity drain for working at a big company at close to 20%.
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.
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.
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 because of that.
I have some personal gripes with small companies too. Taking vacation was always an intense negotiation ("But jbob, we planned to do this work 6 months ago, if you take a vacation, the project is delayed and the client is unhappy!"). Cleanliness was a problem, irregular cleaning or I'd have to do it myself, the multinational I'm at now has the bathrooms cleaned 3 times a day and the floors and desks are cleaned every night. It was difficult to be critical of the smaller companies because I felt like I was insulting my "friends", whereas at the multinational, we guard our personal lives fiercely and have no problems criticizing business direction.
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.
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 because of that.
I have some personal gripes with small companies too. Taking vacation was always an intense negotiation ("But jbob, we planned to do this work 6 months ago, if you take a vacation, the project is delayed and the client is unhappy!"). Cleanliness was a problem, irregular cleaning or I'd have to do it myself, the multinational I'm at now has the bathrooms cleaned 3 times a day and the floors and desks are cleaned every night. It was difficult to be critical of the smaller companies because I felt like I was insulting my "friends", whereas at the multinational, we guard our personal lives fiercely and have no problems criticizing business direction.
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.
"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.
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.
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Me too. Kinda envy GP, I had that for 4 months before the machine decided I was broken and ejected me. Now I only have energy between ShittySmallCo jobs because of the time and mind games they play for that moolah. Livin' the dream!
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.
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.
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.
Same. I do as much as I can in short bursts but past that I’ll just wait for someone to start threatening me. HR can’t fire engineers for dragging their feet anywhere I’m aware of. Never shown up on perf.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
"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.
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.
> 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".
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".
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, excel, email) vs employees that can do real work. (devs, ops, testing ). Lots of chiefs, very few Indians.
- No one owns anything. Responsibilities are diluted.
- Teams lack autonomy.
- 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, excel, email) vs employees that can do real work. (devs, ops, testing ). Lots of chiefs, very few Indians.
- No one owns anything. Responsibilities are diluted.
- Teams lack autonomy.
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.
I had a similar experience. My first job in the industry was with a friend of mine. In two years, the two of us rearchitected an entire product line for a credit union software company-- the teller product, the loan product, the credit reporting system, the web-banking system, the audio banking system, the reporting system, an automatic updates system for the windows applications, etc. We built the mid-level service tiers as well as the UI tiers. Two people, two years. It probably wasn't the best code you've ever seen, but our new product line was the first successful deployment that company had had in over five years.
Fast forward to my next job at a massive company. My team was maybe 30 devs, and twenty testers. It took us two years to deliver two or three basic services that didn't perform well and were super complex to deploy despite the relatively simple nature of the problem we were tasked with solving.
Now, it's not apples to apples. But this pattern has followed in every job I've had except one, where I was on a small, unproductive team with an immensely bad legacy codebase.
Fast forward to my next job at a massive company. My team was maybe 30 devs, and twenty testers. It took us two years to deliver two or three basic services that didn't perform well and were super complex to deploy despite the relatively simple nature of the problem we were tasked with solving.
Now, it's not apples to apples. But this pattern has followed in every job I've had except one, where I was on a small, unproductive team with an immensely bad legacy codebase.
Same here. A while I ago I wrote a pretty complex app for test management alone with WPF in a few months. With synchronization to a server database, lots of concurrency and a lot of other stuff. Talked to users about their needs and came up with a design. Then two of us ported it to a web in a few months.
Now I have to lead development of a site that pretty much does simple CRUD and between offshore devs, proofs of concept, approvals, other teams in the corp, spec writing and reporting to management 10 devs will develop something that's technically inferior and ugly in more time. It's very frustrating.
Now I have to lead development of a site that pretty much does simple CRUD and between offshore devs, proofs of concept, approvals, other teams in the corp, spec writing and reporting to management 10 devs will develop something that's technically inferior and ugly in more time. It's very frustrating.
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?
>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.
Or also the bigger a company gets the more they favor predictability over [early] delivery.
Price's law states that the square root of the people in a particular domain do half the work. So if you have 10 devs, basically 3 do half the work. Scale that up to a thousand devs and 31 devs do half the productive work. Now apply that to sales, accounting, etc. It's really amazing that large companies can accomplish anything at all with that kind of mess to manage.
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 overhead, is 6x dollars. At 5 people, the pair coordination cost is 10x dollars.
At n people, the pair coordination cost is (n(n-1)/2)x dollars, which is asymptotically proportional to n²x as n grows.[a]
When coordination costs are high, as with software development, it's not surprising that small teams outperform large teams.
Large software development teams generally cannot accomplish much -- unless they break into smaller, highly autonomous teams with well-separated responsibilities.
This applies to other high-coordination-cost endeavors, such as building a successful company from scratch.
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[a] This is Metcalfe's law, but for a network's pair coordination cost instead of value: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law
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 overhead, is 6x dollars. At 5 people, the pair coordination cost is 10x dollars.
At n people, the pair coordination cost is (n(n-1)/2)x dollars, which is asymptotically proportional to n²x as n grows.[a]
When coordination costs are high, as with software development, it's not surprising that small teams outperform large teams.
Large software development teams generally cannot accomplish much -- unless they break into smaller, highly autonomous teams with well-separated responsibilities.
This applies to other high-coordination-cost endeavors, such as building a successful company from scratch.
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[a] This is Metcalfe's law, but for a network's pair coordination cost instead of value: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law
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).
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[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16205338
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[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16205338
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.
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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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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 of makes you wonder. Do we dramatically overestimate our abilities, or does the efficiency of companies like Google truly diminish as much as this little thought experiment would seem to suggest?
Now multiply that by ~2,000. That's, roughly, the sort of resources Google has had. Kind of makes you wonder. Do we dramatically overestimate our abilities, or does the efficiency of companies like Google truly diminish as much as this little thought experiment would seem to suggest?
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.
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.
Yes, the joy of a great design is in the delicate balance it strikes between simplicity and conflicting needs. There's plenty of anguish in finding the balance even in the head of a single person.
The space of solutions to a design problem is really high dimensional and the quality of the design has many local maxima. So from that point of view it's not too surprising that averaging the features of several designs puts you at a point in the space which is not a local maximum. For a more apples to apples comparison with the averaging of predictions, it might be useful to consider predicting the value of a random variable drawn from a multimodal distribution. In this case it's highly likely that different people will focus their predictions on different modes and averaging several predictions will be worse than taking a single one in isolation.
The space of solutions to a design problem is really high dimensional and the quality of the design has many local maxima. So from that point of view it's not too surprising that averaging the features of several designs puts you at a point in the space which is not a local maximum. For a more apples to apples comparison with the averaging of predictions, it might be useful to consider predicting the value of a random variable drawn from a multimodal distribution. In this case it's highly likely that different people will focus their predictions on different modes and averaging several predictions will be worse than taking a single one in isolation.
I'd say both. Programming/CS is particularly prone to practitioners overestimating their ability because SW is always incrementally "easy". From my own experience working across SW, HW and some mechanical design it's always the SW part where I get overconfident and I've been at it for almost 30 years.
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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 )
(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.
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
Poorly managed projects (usually) collapse if the cost becomes higher than the benefit
This is why vertically-sliced product teams work - they minimise the communication and coordination overhead associated with Doing a Thing(TM), while layered or function-specific teams make everything take so much longer - particularly as the formal documentation and communication overhead grows enormously when different teams are accountable for different aspects of the same system. When a small team owns an independent(-as-possible) vertical slice, accountability is shared and the need for well-documented communication is largely mitigated.
You're discounting the ability for meetings to disseminate material and the fact that not all pairs need to equally communicate with one another.
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, where everyone has these crazy offices and there's just money flying everywhere and it's all growth growth growth with loads of people joining all the time, I can't help but feel it's an entirely different universe.
We could probably do better with some investment and growth, but it's great to just be a small team.
When I hear about the development world out there, especially in America, where everyone has these crazy offices and there's just money flying everywhere and it's all growth growth growth with loads of people joining all the time, I can't help but feel it's an entirely different universe.
We could probably do better with some investment and growth, but it's great to just be a small team.
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.
I know you're prudently avoiding spamming your product here but I hope you don't mind if I link to your renderer's gallery? It looks amazing.
https://www.indigorenderer.com/image
I'm super impressed by stuff like the accurate light refraction from the lenses and prisms.
https://www.indigorenderer.com/image
I'm super impressed by stuff like the accurate light refraction from the lenses and prisms.
That is amazing indeed
How can you get any work done without a stakeholder telling you what to do, and various managers running around tracking every thing you do and constantly inviting you to meetings?
Wow, just took a look at your renderer and it looks amazing. What kind of people / companies / markets do you tend to sell to, if you don't mind me asking?
Sure, it's mainly architectural and product viz, sometimes lookdev for CG studios.
It's a super tough industry, everyone else is at least 4x our size. Somehow we're still around, doing better than ever really :)
It's a super tough industry, everyone else is at least 4x our size. Somehow we're still around, doing better than ever really :)
Hello! Long time no see - Glad to hear you guys are still in business and by the sound of it still enjoying it :)
(At the risk of blowing my HN "anonymity" I'm the person who (re)wrote large portions of the Blender plugin a few years back)
edit: typo
(At the risk of blowing my HN "anonymity" I'm the person who (re)wrote large portions of the Blender plugin a few years back)
edit: typo
Haha, good to hear from you! Your secret's safe with me ;)
I run a small company of 4 people and we're currently at a $2.3M annualized run-rate. Fully remote keeps our opex very low: only about $125k excluding salaries.
I do feel we've hit a wall though, as our revenue has been ~$2M/yr for the past three years with a fairly consistent team size. We have had difficulty finding the right people who can incrementally grow revenue.
That said our primary competitor has ~80 employees and has to keeps raising more VC (we're 100% revenue funded) while their customers keep churning and showing up on our doorstep.
I do feel we've hit a wall though, as our revenue has been ~$2M/yr for the past three years with a fairly consistent team size. We have had difficulty finding the right people who can incrementally grow revenue.
That said our primary competitor has ~80 employees and has to keeps raising more VC (we're 100% revenue funded) while their customers keep churning and showing up on our doorstep.
You mention a few things I'd love for you to unpack further if you feel willing.
[1] You mention you have your competitor's customers churning onto your doorstep, yet your revenue is flat. Is your flat revenue then related to price cuts, or do you have churn of your own that offsets those gains?
[2] You imply that you think your team size may be the reason for having hit a wall. Care to elaborate on these thoughts?
[3] What is the current team structure (how many eng, marketing, biz, etc.)? You mention finding the right people to incrementally grow revenue.
Just another entrepreneur curious to learn from your experience growing a bootstrapped company. My co-founder and I raised a round last summer, and we're currently at 3 headcount (two of us, plus one hire that started in October in an area we have zero expertise in, but is critical to our business and credibility). We discuss what the inflection points are that will drive additional headcount, and for now that's almost exclusively revenue growth.
[1] You mention you have your competitor's customers churning onto your doorstep, yet your revenue is flat. Is your flat revenue then related to price cuts, or do you have churn of your own that offsets those gains?
[2] You imply that you think your team size may be the reason for having hit a wall. Care to elaborate on these thoughts?
[3] What is the current team structure (how many eng, marketing, biz, etc.)? You mention finding the right people to incrementally grow revenue.
Just another entrepreneur curious to learn from your experience growing a bootstrapped company. My co-founder and I raised a round last summer, and we're currently at 3 headcount (two of us, plus one hire that started in October in an area we have zero expertise in, but is critical to our business and credibility). We discuss what the inflection points are that will drive additional headcount, and for now that's almost exclusively revenue growth.
[1] We actually closed 2017 at $1.9M but we're already at $2.3M ARR heavily due to those recent inbound. It's been a fairly consistent and frustrating ebb and flow. We'll often get a new product launched and see uptake just about the time we lose a different product.
[2] I feel like we have a pretty solid model at this point in terms the steps to create a new successful product, but I tend to do all those steps and I've definitely hit the wall on not having enough hours in the day. In the past I think our failure was trying to hire people to replicate that process across new people. It's been tough finding capable people. I very often have the crippling thought of "This is taking so long, and so much of my time, I should just do it myself". This year we're switching things up to instead try and delegate my existing responsibilities as much as possible and free up my own time for new product development instead.
[3] 3 engineering (me + 2 eng) and 1 biz/sales (co-founder). Engineering/Data side is absolutely our bottleneck. I've had a lot of difficulty (I'm a poor people manager and terrible at hiring) in finding the right people. Generally speaking I think generalists with a keen eye for the bottom-line would be the most helpful (e.g. tech entrepreneurs) but those people tend all have their own startups or golden handcuffs.
My advice would absolutely to keep things small as possible as long as possible. Identify areas you can automate to free up your time, and prioritize work based upon revenue-potential. Avoid doing stuff that engineers love (let's rewrite our stack in Go and React!) and stick to your core proficiencies. Clients rarely care what technology you use, they care about whether or not it solves their problems. If you have any control over it at this point, go for clients that have a lot of money. It's a hell of a lot easier to manage one big client paying $250k a year than it is to manage 2,500 small-business clients very upset your $10/mo product doesn't precisely meet their specific needs.
[2] I feel like we have a pretty solid model at this point in terms the steps to create a new successful product, but I tend to do all those steps and I've definitely hit the wall on not having enough hours in the day. In the past I think our failure was trying to hire people to replicate that process across new people. It's been tough finding capable people. I very often have the crippling thought of "This is taking so long, and so much of my time, I should just do it myself". This year we're switching things up to instead try and delegate my existing responsibilities as much as possible and free up my own time for new product development instead.
[3] 3 engineering (me + 2 eng) and 1 biz/sales (co-founder). Engineering/Data side is absolutely our bottleneck. I've had a lot of difficulty (I'm a poor people manager and terrible at hiring) in finding the right people. Generally speaking I think generalists with a keen eye for the bottom-line would be the most helpful (e.g. tech entrepreneurs) but those people tend all have their own startups or golden handcuffs.
My advice would absolutely to keep things small as possible as long as possible. Identify areas you can automate to free up your time, and prioritize work based upon revenue-potential. Avoid doing stuff that engineers love (let's rewrite our stack in Go and React!) and stick to your core proficiencies. Clients rarely care what technology you use, they care about whether or not it solves their problems. If you have any control over it at this point, go for clients that have a lot of money. It's a hell of a lot easier to manage one big client paying $250k a year than it is to manage 2,500 small-business clients very upset your $10/mo product doesn't precisely meet their specific needs.
curious as to specifics of your team/what you guys are solving?
My contact info is in my profile if you don't mind connecting.
I'd be interested to hear, too, if OP is comfortable sharing.
Wow, congratulations! I think you've described a dream case for many people. Hope you find a resolution to the revenue wall soon.
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
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
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.
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.
You nailed it. We have so many diets within our company that there is no way we can go out together and everyone to be happy. Even ordering snack is a torture.
[deleted]
If I may interject a small, shameless self-promotion, we recently published a paper looking at exactly this using GitHub data [0]. Lots of caveats, academic limitations abound of course, but it may be of interest to some.
[0] R Soc Open Sci. 2016 Apr; 3(4): 160007 https://dx.doi.org/10.1098%2Frsos.160007
[0] R Soc Open Sci. 2016 Apr; 3(4): 160007 https://dx.doi.org/10.1098%2Frsos.160007
tldr?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Smaller teams have easier communication.
In computer science there is something called "Amdahl's law"[1] which shows how processing throughput slows as you add more CPU's mostly due to communications overhead. I suspect that large teams with low productivity are influenced by a similar effect. The great book, "The mythical man month" touched on this.
There are probably other human-related causes (like freeloaders and legal issues) too.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law
In computer science there is something called "Amdahl's law"[1] which shows how processing throughput slows as you add more CPU's mostly due to communications overhead. I suspect that large teams with low productivity are influenced by a similar effect. The great book, "The mythical man month" touched on this.
There are probably other human-related causes (like freeloaders and legal issues) too.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law
One thing to keep an eye on as your team grows is process. It's very typical for processes/systems to evolve as teams grow and people have new opinions and decide new pieces need to get added. It's almost never the case that process gets removed. Over time, you can build a decent slowdown into your work just as a series of small increases in process cost.
It is. But you're not developing a lasting institution which survives any one individual's bus. Further, a team kept artificially small tends to produce crap due to understaffing. Large companies can also fund work on particularly interesting problems with a long-term pay off, something that many small companies don't do because they need profits now.
There are also substantial personnel issues with smaller companies: lack of HR, legal, finance. Nepotism, lack of accountability, etc all tend to be factors in smaller companies. Of course, benefits tend to be less too. (I've seen all of the above).
I would work for the right startup. But most don't meaningfully compete on the "adult" factor until they are distinctly larger than a small team.
I've never been yanked by big companies as a worker[1]; the smaller the company, the more yanking I've had to deal with. I attribute this to a present and functional Legal and HR team, along with money to hire adequately competent people.
There are also substantial personnel issues with smaller companies: lack of HR, legal, finance. Nepotism, lack of accountability, etc all tend to be factors in smaller companies. Of course, benefits tend to be less too. (I've seen all of the above).
I would work for the right startup. But most don't meaningfully compete on the "adult" factor until they are distinctly larger than a small team.
I've never been yanked by big companies as a worker[1]; the smaller the company, the more yanking I've had to deal with. I attribute this to a present and functional Legal and HR team, along with money to hire adequately competent people.
Don't forget that it often comes at the cost of the team's sanity. Don't ride your people too hard.
It should be flipped. The surprise isn't in the small team but how large teams destroy productivity and velocity. Some things require lots of torque, and large teams, if someone can figure out how to give even a modest productivity boost to larger teams, that is where the revolution will occur.
In all my experience Im a firm believer that all you need is 7 talented people and you can accomplish anything.
Yeah, the title befuddles me. I don't find it surprising at all. Scaling is hard and the overhead grows exponentially. Another thing that small teams have going for them is that it forces focus. You can't afford to waste time having 20 people investigate something or chase one customer.
Small teams can get a lot done but they can do a lot of damage too. I work in a small company now after leaving a large one. If I screwed up bad enough at the large company I'd get fired and maybe a few others would get fired too but that's about it. Screw up at a small company and it's lights out for the whole show. They key, big or small, is managing what you have to meet your goals. You can muddle your way through with brilliant engineers and mediocre management or mediocre engineers and brilliant management but to really make things sing you need brilliant managers and brilliant engineers.
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
If we look back, Google made really good decisions in its early days. Founder's bill is a brilliant invention, thanks to Eric Schmidt
What is founder's bill?
Big teams gives the inexperienced product person an impression that more features can be done which can lead to design changes when things go jive, and you get stuck more and more
I think the problem with bigger groups is the policies that formalize processes. They're all mental baggage and inefficiency.
Aside, I just read that guy's LinkedIn:
"ClassDojo is one of the fastest growing education technology companies of all time, used and loved by 35 million+ teachers, parents and students in over 90% of US schools"
90% of US schools? Why aren't they a $10b company?
"ClassDojo is one of the fastest growing education technology companies of all time, used and loved by 35 million+ teachers, parents and students in over 90% of US schools"
90% of US schools? Why aren't they a $10b company?
> 90% of US schools? Why aren't they a $10b company?
From looking at Class dojo,, I would guess because supporting large number of users is a cost; now, in a perfect company, there's a monetization strategy that creates value from that user base, but ClassDojo’s user base is neither ad-friendly nor likely to pay out-of-pocket.
They implicitly (from the “always free for teachers” line) are open to trying to get students, parents, or “school leaders” to pay, but any of those might prevent teachers from using it (or even being allowed to) even if it was free for the teacher.
From looking at Class dojo,, I would guess because supporting large number of users is a cost; now, in a perfect company, there's a monetization strategy that creates value from that user base, but ClassDojo’s user base is neither ad-friendly nor likely to pay out-of-pocket.
They implicitly (from the “always free for teachers” line) are open to trying to get students, parents, or “school leaders” to pay, but any of those might prevent teachers from using it (or even being allowed to) even if it was free for the teacher.
It’s Surprising How Little Big Teams Can Get Done
[deleted]
That could almost be a corollary to Brooke's Law[0] (aka the mythical man month).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law
It seems the bigger a company gets the more they favor predictability over excellence.