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I worked in teams maintaining large projects and I also built (and maintained) a few ones myself after starting my own business, so I can sort of compare. I'd s

I worked in teams maintaining large projects and I also built (and maintained) a few ones myself after starting my own business, so I can sort of compare. I'd say it's a matter of risk management. When 1 or 2 people are building a project, making decisions is easy. You consider the options, you pick a strategy and you're the one to blame if it fails. If that happens, you pick up the pieces and try to pivot, but you're still in charge. When you introduce more people to the process of decision making (even on low engineering levels), it creates a massive political overhead. People compete for visibility, so they will propose ideas even if they don't make much sense strategically. People have feelings, so they will often support ideas of their friends and dismiss the ideas of their enemies regardless of the business impact. People don't want to be responsible for failure, so they will often create lots of unnecessary low risk/low impact work instead of taking risks. So there will be indeed a lot of extra work, but in many cases the customers won't notice the difference. The upside of this is fault tolerance - if one of the 2 co-founders leaves a company, it is doomed. If the same work is done by a team of 13, you can fire and easily replace 1-4 of them without much impact and investors generally like that.

lopmotr 9y ago
I'd say the risk management is bigger than that. If you have 10 customers and cock something up, that's 10 people affected. But with a million customers, the same cock-up causes 100,000 times as much damage and might cost 100,000 times as much money. So you can spend something closer to factor more to reduce the likelihood of it happening by up to 100,000 times.
- john_moscow 9y ago
  I don't think the only side effect of this type of inefficiency is increased costs. I would love to see some scientific research on it, but my hunch from working in overstaffed companies suggests that if you don't let people self-actualize through taking responsibilities and putting their ego into the problems they solve, they start self-actualizing in office politics, creating a toxic environment and ultimately making the company incapable of smart decisions. Modern work culture does a pretty good job hiding it behind a thick layer of company values, virtue signalling and multiple-page integrity policies though. Besides, you can actually mitigate the cock-up risks without going crazy on your head count: have focus groups, beta testers, roll out updates gradually, have a clear separation of layers and a mechanism to roll back a breaking change, etc.

lopmotr 9y ago

I'd say the risk management is bigger than that. If you have 10 customers and cock something up, that's 10 people affected. But with a million customers, the same cock-up causes 100,000 times as much damage and might cost 100,000 times as much money. So you can spend something closer to factor more to reduce the likelihood of it happening by up to 100,000 times.

john_moscow 9y ago
I don't think the only side effect of this type of inefficiency is increased costs. I would love to see some scientific research on it, but my hunch from working in overstaffed companies suggests that if you don't let people self-actualize through taking responsibilities and putting their ego into the problems they solve, they start self-actualizing in office politics, creating a toxic environment and ultimately making the company incapable of smart decisions. Modern work culture does a pretty good job hiding it behind a thick layer of company values, virtue signalling and multiple-page integrity policies though. Besides, you can actually mitigate the cock-up risks without going crazy on your head count: have focus groups, beta testers, roll out updates gradually, have a clear separation of layers and a mechanism to roll back a breaking change, etc.