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Somewhere along the way Mythical Man Month was turned from a cautionary tale into a competition, and it only ever seems to happen once VC gets their mitts on a

by ljm 6y ago

Somewhere along the way Mythical Man Month was turned from a cautionary tale into a competition, and it only ever seems to happen once VC gets their mitts on a company. Does it really take a team of 800 engineers to maintain your fancy todo list app, rather than your focussed team of 10 or 20? What are all of those people doing except piling on organisational cruft so the business has no choice but to over-encumber itself with talent? Most of them aren't working on the product, that's for sure.

jack_riminton 6y ago
Yeah somewhere along the line people confused success with the amount of money you’ve raised and the number of people you employ. This just incentivises complexity
notsureaboutpg 6y ago
At scale, yeah it does take a lot of people to do this. It has nothing to do with the type of app and everything to do with how business works. At scale you have huge enterprise customers with complex setups and they want to integrate your fancy todo list app into their setup and will pay you tons to do it. Your fancy todo list app suddenly needs to have all sorts of security certifications, needs to guarantee some type of uptime, needs to be able to integrate with all sorts of systems and other products (some of which none of your current engineers will have experience with). A new device will be released (think Apple Watch) and you're leaving money on the table if you don't hire some engineers to put your fancy todo list app on that platform along with the 5 or 6 others it's already maintained on. At scale, 1 in a million type bugs/problems come up every day and you need more engineers to deal with them. At scale, you are generating and producing (and thus need to be collecting and analyzing) an amazing amount of data, which should be used to better your product, learn about your customers and try to grow your business into providing other products and services your customers want / need. All that data collection, storage, and analysis requires more and more engineers.
swlkr 6y ago
These companies might hire people as an edge against any future competition. Talented engineers are tied up doing menial tasks but getting paid $300k/year, cheaper than having to compete?
- ymolodtsov 6y ago
  There's only a handful companies out there who might be doing that, namely Google, Facebook and a few others. No other company is at the scale to meaningfully affect the market.

by ljm 6y ago

jack_riminton 6y ago

Yeah somewhere along the line people confused success with the amount of money you’ve raised and the number of people you employ. This just incentivises complexity

notsureaboutpg 6y ago

At scale, yeah it does take a lot of people to do this. It has nothing to do with the type of app and everything to do with how business works. At scale you have huge enterprise customers with complex setups and they want to integrate your fancy todo list app into their setup and will pay you tons to do it. Your fancy todo list app suddenly needs to have all sorts of security certifications, needs to guarantee some type of uptime, needs to be able to integrate with all sorts of systems and other products (some of which none of your current engineers will have experience with). A new device will be released (think Apple Watch) and you're leaving money on the table if you don't hire some engineers to put your fancy todo list app on that platform along with the 5 or 6 others it's already maintained on. At scale, 1 in a million type bugs/problems come up every day and you need more engineers to deal with them. At scale, you are generating and producing (and thus need to be collecting and analyzing) an amazing amount of data, which should be used to better your product, learn about your customers and try to grow your business into providing other products and services your customers want / need. All that data collection, storage, and analysis requires more and more engineers.

swlkr 6y ago

These companies might hire people as an edge against any future competition. Talented engineers are tied up doing menial tasks but getting paid $300k/year, cheaper than having to compete?

ymolodtsov 6y ago
There's only a handful companies out there who might be doing that, namely Google, Facebook and a few others. No other company is at the scale to meaningfully affect the market.