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>Having been an employee at several startups that have transitioned past the 30-40 headcount mark, there does seem to be a breakdown at that stage. What is the
by sbierwagen 9y ago
>Having been an employee at several startups that have transitioned past the 30-40 headcount mark, there does seem to be a breakdown at that stage. What is the cause, and how do you deal with it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
40 is about the point where the CEO can't possibly manage everyone one-on-one, and has to start delegating real management tasks.
- evincarofautumn 9y agoYup, in my experience, 40–50 is also about when a classroom changes from “small class” to “lecture hall” or needs a TA, for similar reasons. Plus the number of edges in a fully connected graph of relationships would exceed 1000 at this point, so the graph starts to partition itself: employees stop working directly with most of their colleagues and start dividing into more isolated “tribes”. And this goes on to affect the structure of their projects, e.g., software architecture[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law