5 ms·

This is a common trope on HN that's strange to me. I feel like people are unable to see the complexity of an organization from the outside, but normally accept

• Slartie 6y ago
  Might have something to do with the paycheck you're receiving regularly while on the inside...
  • thelean12 6y ago
    Or just a better understanding of the organization and the problems they face. The inability to use that understanding and apply it elsewhere is what's strange to me.
    • bentcorner 6y ago
      "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
      • thelean12 6y ago
        Uhh that doesn't really apply here. I'm sure executives could make a lot of money if they could get the same output with 20% of the workforce. I'm not the one convincing people my services are needed. I'm the one being poached because they are.
  • nindalf 6y ago
    This is needlessly personal, bordering on ad hominem. I've never received a paycheck from Uber but I have worked for large organisations. 3800 people on engineering doesn't seem unusual to me. I can't justify the employment of each of those 3800 but I know for sure that this product could not have been built by 100 engineers.
• cwzwarich 6y ago
  Sometimes an organization is complex because it has a lot of employees, rather than needing a lot of employees because it's inherently complex. You see the same thing with large software projects.
  • thelean12 6y ago
    Sure, there's always going to be bloat, but complexity at scale isn't just because there are a lot of employees. Twitter is a great example. I bet they have 20+ people working on a specific anti-abuse system. Another 20+ working on a specific ad type that makes the company money. Another team that just works on account security. Another team that works on internal tooling. Or the shared UI components team. Etc until you get the current state of Twitter. All of those teams don't need to exist when Twitter is small, but do when they scale.
    • samcal 6y ago
      We can definitely agree that as a company grows, it needs more employees. I think the point at issue is that there is such thing as having too many employees. There are multiple opposing forces in tension here, and the tricky part is striking the right balance. I think that GP was trying to say that they hired too many people, and introduced complexity.
      • thelean12 6y ago
        A layoff is certainly a sign that they hired too much, I agree. I was going off what I figured the poster was getting at: they don't understand how Uber has even 80% of their employees.
        • samcal 6y ago
          Is that what they were getting at? It seems to me like you made up that 80% number just now, to prove your point.
          • 6y ago
• friedman23 6y ago
  >This is a common trope on HN that's strange to me. It's because HN is not filled with people with knowledge of the industry anymore. People in tech are now the minority.
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    You must be joking.
    • friedman23 6y ago
      Given the quality of discussion on this website, no im not.
• kyleblarson 6y ago
  It's the classic line: "That's so simple, I could have built that" which warrants the classic response: "fuck you, you didn't".
  • echelon 6y ago
    Why the hostility? Sure we have the benefit of hindsight to solutions that fit within the product demand fitness landscape. But by identifying areas we could have attacked, we shape our intuition and gain the confidence to exploit other areas of opportunity. That's valuable. I think this warrants a reframing - instead of focusing on missed opportunities, look ahead for new ones. There will be gradients for the foreseeable future. Learn to spot them, learn the skills you need, and then position yourself to solve the problems. With the knowledge I have now, I could have built Facebook, Twitter, Uber. But I didn't know to do it then. I'm trying to put myself in the right place to solve problems that matter to me that I also think could move the needle.
    • therealdrag0 6y ago
      It’s faux/facetious hostility. And it’s I response to a naive/offensive/belittling comment. I’ve not worked in a company as big as Uber, but just in mid sized companies with also midsized markets and there is never an end to the work that needs done. I don’t see why it’s hard to believe it takes a lot of hands to build something like Uber. And I think you’re wrong that you could have built Uber/Twitter/facebook even with what you k ow after the fact. You could have built a toy simulacrum, but put it before millions of users and it’d fall apart, and not just from scale, but missing features; all the different OSs, regional controls, payment controls, mapping, pricing models, etc. If there was a spec for one of these companies it’d be thousands of thousands of pages long and most of it you don’t know about; no single person could. So a little faux hostility seems warranted.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• kube-system 6y ago
  People tend to subconsciously assume the operations of an organization are linearly associated with the public-facing products and services they provide. People quantify based off of what they know and understand. Nobody can quantify the effort associated with an effort they didn't know existed.
• Redoubts 6y ago
  I seen plenty of people who think their orgs are bloated. I know I've felt some teams could lose half the workforce at no real cost.