Hacker News Reader

Comment by JohnMakin | Hacker News Reader

> Startups ship more per person than big companies – everyone knows this

The post starts out by assuming this but I am not convinced this is true along the entire graph, if the x axis is amount of people on a team and the y axis is amount "shipped". As a company scales output, at some point in this graph the output per person from the large team should overtake the small team, otherwise why do we even have large teams in the first place? How do large teams form if not from necessity? Seems they are advocating for small one pizza teams working together in tandem at scale? Because that's essentially the way I've seen it done everywhere I've ever worked and it isn't a new idea, and what you have at the end of that is a larger unit that definitely constitutes a "department" and a "large team" even if the large team consists of several small teams. The communication overhead there can get extremely complex as well.

View on HN

Companies increase team size because they want to increase overall output, not per-person output. Even if 20 people produce half as much per person as 5 people, they’re still getting twice as much done.

(The other answers take a cynical “managers suck!” stance, which isn’t entirely wrong, but it’s not the main reason. Companies mainly add people because they want more output, simple as that.)

Could it also be the case that some people just aren’t suited for small teams?

I don’t have any experience actually handling this sort of thing, so here’s some rampant speculation instead:

A small team of motivated rockstars might be the fastest way to solve a problem. But, there are a lot of non-rockstars out there. Maybe marshaling up a little talent from a lot of people is more feasible for some organizations/problems (in particular some types of problems might be boring, and not attractive to a team of rockstars).

Rockstars expect rockstar compensation.

I find that pretty much all managers balk at the idea of paying someone more than they get paid, but are happy for total payroll to be stratospheric. Until we deal with this mental illness we will always have expensive shit software written by huge teams.

Yeah. Increases in team size typically mean an increase in specialization and a decrease in productivity because of the larger amount of communication that must be done to keep everyone moving in the same direction.

I was responsible for a lot more at a small company, and I only had to convince one other person if I wanted to do something within my corner. At a large company, I may have to convince representatives from teams representing > 100 people.

That takes time.

But as an organization, we can solve problems that weren't possible to solve at the small company due to lack of resources and lack of people who could sit heads down and work on a problem for 6 months due to their other responsibilities.

Large companies vs. large teams is not the same.

> How do large teams form if not from necessity?

Not sure if there's some Parkinson or Murphy's law, but every manager complains about too little headcount. Also count of people reporting to you (directly or indirectly) is one of the measures of success for managers.

> Large companies vs. large teams is not the same.

sure, but isn’t this OP making a direct comparison?

Large teams are a non-monetary bonus/incentive for the managerial class. At a manager's prospective employer they'll be asked for and judged by their headcount, much like engineers are asked for their previous salary.

Large teams don't cause success. They require success to sustain their bloat.

In 2020, I interviewed at Google. One of the screening questions was my current team size. I had no idea (but had a system where I could look it up). I was under by a little more than a factor of 2, because I don’t care about my team size as a vanity metric, but I can confirm that recruiters are very interested in it.

It's selection bias. This person is only considering successful startups and comparing them to big companies, not the huge number of startups that fail before they ever manage to ship anything.

It may also depend on the kind of thing that's being shipped. Want to ship something large and monolithic? Want it quick? You need a big team.

If your product can be modularized into small problems/features/projects that are one- or two-pizza sized, and the abstraction overhead to connect pieces together is low enough, then yeah, small teams make more sense.

I suppose the real question is whether the cost of splitting big problems into small ones is worth the productivity bonus of working on those small problems.

>As a company scales output, at some point in this graph the output per person from the large team should overtake the small team, otherwise why do we even have large teams in the first place?

Asymptotic growth. The net contribution of each new member approaches zero but never quite reaches it. For any small team a larger team can out produce them because they throw more bodies at the problem.

From what I've seen, total output (usually) continues increasing, but at a certain point, the curse of scale is bureaucracy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com