4 ms·
"What is your alternative?" Aggressively small teams, with no hands-off middle-management layer. You can build massive capability around a small number of wel
by cturner 6y ago
"What is your alternative?"
Aggressively small teams, with no hands-off middle-management layer.
You can build massive capability around a small number of well-managed message-backbones and a single codebase. By keeping the number of hands small and the structure flat, you force high standards. (Skilled staff won't tolerate distractions caused by bad engineering or inadequate automation.)
Heuristic for analysing firms: who has strategic power in decision-making? Conventional answer: a group of hands-off middle-managers who run on meeting tempo, and who are valued by how many people and systems report into them. Under AST: an engineering effort running on maker tempo in cooperation with a hands-on sales effort.
Microservices tend to have multilateral contracts with other systems in the organisation. This steers all planning towards meetings. This creates middle-management bloat.
- herval 6y agoIs there any example where this works (articles, presentations, etc)? In particular, anywhere with more than a couple dozen developers?
- dodobirdlord 6y agoAmazon has a famous love for what they call “two-pizza teams” and you can find writeups about the philosophy by searching the term. The joke is that a team should be small enough that you only need to order two pizzas to feed them all. The philosophy is about the number of participants in the decision-making process. Keep teams small and give them total ownership of decision making so that decisions can be made by a small group of people who work with each other every day. That way no meetings (and certainly no cross-team meeting) need to happen for most decisions to be made.
- wtetzner 6y ago> The joke is that a team should be small enough that you only need to order two pizzas to feed them all. That's a tricky way to measure, given that I can eat a large pizza myself in a single sitting ;)
- herval 6y agoAmazon is very well known for having A LOT of middle managers too, so I'm not sure it's a good example?
- dodobirdlord 6y agoSeems sorta reasonable that if you need a manager for every 6-8 engineers, you would end up with a lot of managers.
- herval 6y agoOP’s post was “ Aggressively small teams, with no hands-off middle-management layer”. 6-8 swe teams + hands off people manager reporting to middle manager, who reports to director, is how Amazon organizes teams, therefore it isn’t an example of what their suggestion was...