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Comment by lostmyoldone | Hacker News Reader

With those team sizes, those pizza must either be huge, or Amazon is ridiculously "frugal", or less politely: cheap.

But it sure explains a lot. I never understood how AWS could both work reasonably well, and simultaneously be such an utter mess when it comes to how configuration looks, how the console UI acts, etc.

However, if the teams actually are as loosely coupled as claimed, valued accordingly with 2 pizzas for an up to 10 person team. If they then more or less all of them all have their own "P&L", then that's exactly what one would expect. Everyone doing what's necessary for their individual P&L, trying to avoid taking on any additional responsibility. Overarching concerns, and aspects mostly existing in the interface between teams will almost certainly be either ignored completely, or only given the very least amount effort necessary to keep up appearances.

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I was working at Amazon when the 2-pizza team idea was introduced. A week or two later, we though "we're a 2-pizza team now, let's order some pizza". That when we found out that there was no budget for pizza, it was merely a theoretical concept. At the time the annual "morale budget" (for food and other items) was about $5 per person.

These days I think the morale budget is a bit higher; in 2013 there were birthday cakes once a month.

You've got to give respect to Amazon. In most companies you have the grunts, then the engineers. Google will shower engineers with benefits, but the guy driving the google maps car gets nothing (contractor), Facebook? Shower the engineers with benefits! Have to read through death threats daily? You. Get. Nothing! (Contractor). Amazon? Fuck you, you're all getting gruel.

Good point, I wonder why Amazon doesn't point this out whenever people give them a hard time about how the fulfillment center jobs suck. They could present themselves as paragons of egalitarianism.

I can confirm that the 2-pizza thing is just an analogy and when pizza is ordered there is more than 2 pizzas provided.

Can confirm. Here's our team at a marketing event - https://i.imgur.com/YLFomNd.jpg

That’s a standard team size for agile, so I’m not really sure what the concern is.

How huge could a "One-Burrito" Team possibly be?

http://www.costena.com/famous.html

On May 3rd, 1997 La Costeña of Mountain View, California created the world's largest burrito. The burrito weighed in at 4,456.3 pounds and was measured at 3,578 feet long. It was created at Rengstorff Park in Mountain View.

(So big they had to photograph it from an airplane!)

http://www.supersizedmeals.com/food/article.php/200604112036...

That's always a balancing act.

With a lot of small teams, you have each team producing components which are relatively good individually thanks to easy, flat, one to one communication and continuity of means and responsibility. The alternative is some degree of siloing which tends to cause significant overhead which can even result in an organization being completely blocked.

But it's not a perfect approach either. It's really hard to maintain consistency and you tend to have some degree of duplicated effort. This explains partly why AWS is so inconsistent in term of API and also why the console is so slow (and just unusable garbage past a certain size).

And it's not like there is no gradation in between individual teams acting alone and big silos. You could pretty much have something that tries to mix the better of both view, with some kind of lose central authority that is here to enforce stability, SLA, overall architecture and consistency of interfaces (both API and UI) but doesn't dictate which tools mut be used.

They are referring to NY style pizza. Standard serving is 2 slices per person.

Are there any companies getting cross-team collaboration and prioritization right? I'd love to read more on how they approach it from a planning standpoint.

There are a lot of services that AWS have that are free or so cheap that they couldn’t have their own P&L. They are obviously loss leaders.

> Two-pizza teams are so named because they’re small: 6 to 10 people

That sounds about right to me. How much pizza are you eating?

The whole pizza.

When I go to an Italian restaurant, I eat a whole pizza by myself. Size is roughly 30cm diameter. I can only assume that those two-pizza-team pizzas are either ginormous, or they're those American-style pizzas where eating more than 2 slices gives you an immediate heart attack.

You can safely assume since Amazon is a US company we're talking about US pizzas, where a single pizza serves 3-5 people. Also, it's typical with American pizza to serve sides such as salad, garlic bread, pasta, fries, etc. and beverages, dessert so "2 pizza" can be read as "2 pizza plus usual sides".

> Domino’s large pizzas are the perfect answer to feeding a hungry group. These 14-inch pizzas feed approximately three to five people

https://www.dominos.com/en/about-pizza/sizes/large/

Italian pizzas are almost 2x the size though. So with sides they even out.

Pizza varies by region in Italy. So to which are you referring when you say “Italian pizzas”?

Never seen a single pizza feed 5 people where someone did not need to stop at McD on the way back home.

Five people? Maybe five kids under the age of ten.

TIL I've apparently had several hundred immediate heart attacks.

The pizzas that are ordered for a group in the US are generally 16-18 inches (40-45cm). They are usually not as thin-crusted as Italian-style pizzas are, and they usually have more cheese and toppings. Depending on toppings a complete pizza can be more than 4000 calories.

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