18 ms·

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

208 points by jameshk 9y ago

tw1010 9y ago
It’s Surprising How Little Big Teams Can Get Done
- ChrisSD 9y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
ProAm 9y ago
In all my experience Im a firm believer that all you need is 7 talented people and you can accomplish anything.
- snarf21 9y ago
  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.
pixelpoet 9y ago
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.
- Edmond 9y ago
  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.
- Boxxed 9y ago
  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?
  - pixelpoet 9y ago
    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 :)
- Nition 9y ago
  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 https://www.indigorenderer.com/image I'm super impressed by stuff like the accurate light refraction from the lenses and prisms.
  - nojvek 9y ago
    That is amazing indeed
- wdfx 9y ago
  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
  - 9y ago
aidenn0 9y ago
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.
- suryamp 9y ago
  Yeah, I agree that there is definitely a productivity dip as a team grows in size.
cs702 9y ago
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. -- [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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  This is, incidentally, the formalization of my intuition about bureaucracies and general organizational efficiencies[0] - basically, organizational inefficiency comes almost entirely from coordination costs. This is why government organizations are inefficient (way too many stakeholders), why big companies tend to be about as bureaucratic as governments, and while small governmental projects are much less efficient than small private project (because "small" government ops still has lots of non-obvious stakeholders that come from accountability requirements). -- [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16205338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16205338
  - secabeen 9y ago
    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.
dreyfan 9y ago
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.
- wjossey 9y ago
  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.
  - dreyfan 9y ago
    [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.
doh 9y ago
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-more-productive-1797824738 https://lifehacker.com/follow-jeff-bezos-two-pizza-rule-for-... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13726224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13726224
- 0xfeba 9y ago
  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.
  - doh 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      [deleted]
hennsen 9y ago
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...
- agumonkey 9y ago
  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.
maxxxxx 9y ago
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 am just finishing a project that took 2 years. I am thoroughly convinced that the 2 developers who did most of the work could easily have done it in half the time if they didn't have to work with other teams who didn't deliver and stakeholders who couldn't make up their mind. We could just have worked through each issue but instead we had to wait for other teams and deal with their mediocre output which was incredibly frustrating and demoralizing. It seems the bigger a company gets the more they favor predictability over excellence.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago
  > 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.
- jrs235 9y ago
  >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.
- mmanfrin 9y ago
  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.
  - Swizec 9y ago
    Then again copy that changes conversions by 0.0005% can mean a multimillion dollar difference for some companies. So it’s kinda important.
bpicolo 9y ago
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.
bagrow 9y ago
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 https://dx.doi.org/10.1098%2Frsos.160007
- kthartic 9y ago
  tldr?
amelius 9y ago
Yes, that's why small startups can be disruptive. But ... big companies have figured this out too, so the good days may be numbered.
- felideon 9y ago
  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?
tomc1985 9y ago
Don't forget that it often comes at the cost of the team's sanity. Don't ride your people too hard.
ebiester 9y ago
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.
- regularfry 9y ago
  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.
g9yuayon 9y ago
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
- rpedela 9y ago
  What is founder's bill?
pnathan 9y ago
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.
sitkack 9y ago
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.
chasd00 9y ago
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.
CPAhem 9y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law
kolbe 9y ago
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?
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > 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.
m3kw9 9y ago
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
socceroos 9y ago
I think the problem with bigger groups is the policies that formalize processes. They're all mental baggage and inefficiency.

208 points by jameshk 9y ago

tw1010 9y ago

It’s Surprising How Little Big Teams Can Get Done

ChrisSD 9y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

ProAm 9y ago

In all my experience Im a firm believer that all you need is 7 talented people and you can accomplish anything.

snarf21 9y ago
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.

pixelpoet 9y ago

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.

Edmond 9y ago
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.
Boxxed 9y ago
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?
- pixelpoet 9y ago
  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 :)
Nition 9y ago
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 https://www.indigorenderer.com/image I'm super impressed by stuff like the accurate light refraction from the lenses and prisms.
- nojvek 9y ago
  That is amazing indeed
wdfx 9y ago
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
- 9y ago

aidenn0 9y ago

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.

suryamp 9y ago
Yeah, I agree that there is definitely a productivity dip as a team grows in size.

cs702 9y ago

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. -- [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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law

TeMPOraL 9y ago
This is, incidentally, the formalization of my intuition about bureaucracies and general organizational efficiencies[0] - basically, organizational inefficiency comes almost entirely from coordination costs. This is why government organizations are inefficient (way too many stakeholders), why big companies tend to be about as bureaucratic as governments, and while small governmental projects are much less efficient than small private project (because "small" government ops still has lots of non-obvious stakeholders that come from accountability requirements). -- [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16205338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16205338
- secabeen 9y ago
  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.

dreyfan 9y ago

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.

wjossey 9y ago
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.
- dreyfan 9y ago
  [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.

doh 9y ago

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-more-productive-1797824738 https://lifehacker.com/follow-jeff-bezos-two-pizza-rule-for-... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13726224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13726224

0xfeba 9y ago
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.
- doh 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    [deleted]

hennsen 9y ago

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...

agumonkey 9y ago
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.

maxxxxx 9y ago

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 am just finishing a project that took 2 years. I am thoroughly convinced that the 2 developers who did most of the work could easily have done it in half the time if they didn't have to work with other teams who didn't deliver and stakeholders who couldn't make up their mind. We could just have worked through each issue but instead we had to wait for other teams and deal with their mediocre output which was incredibly frustrating and demoralizing. It seems the bigger a company gets the more they favor predictability over excellence.

erikpukinskis 9y ago
> 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.
jrs235 9y ago
>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.
mmanfrin 9y ago
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.
- Swizec 9y ago
  Then again copy that changes conversions by 0.0005% can mean a multimillion dollar difference for some companies. So it’s kinda important.

bpicolo 9y ago

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.

bagrow 9y ago

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 https://dx.doi.org/10.1098%2Frsos.160007

kthartic 9y ago
tldr?

amelius 9y ago

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

felideon 9y ago
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?

tomc1985 9y ago

Don't forget that it often comes at the cost of the team's sanity. Don't ride your people too hard.

ebiester 9y ago

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.

regularfry 9y ago
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.

g9yuayon 9y ago

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

rpedela 9y ago
What is founder's bill?

pnathan 9y ago

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.

sitkack 9y ago

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.

chasd00 9y ago

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.

CPAhem 9y ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law

kolbe 9y ago

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?

dragonwriter 9y ago
> 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.

m3kw9 9y ago

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

socceroos 9y ago

I think the problem with bigger groups is the policies that formalize processes. They're all mental baggage and inefficiency.