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The key untested question then, I think, is whether you can successfully identify the 5 vs 1000 when recruiting. I think it would be pretty easy to show that th
by jwecker 15y ago
The key untested question then, I think, is whether you can successfully identify the 5 vs 1000 when recruiting. I think it would be pretty easy to show that there exist teams of 5 that outperform teams of 1,000 (certainly teams of 20 outperforming teams of 4,000). (be grateful you haven't had to work for any of the latter)
A secondary open question would be whether an existing team of 5 who currently outperform some larger number tend to continually outperform them after being acquired. I would bet that the performance gap would be close to the same. At the very least I would suggest that the cases from other industries give us next to no insight for software development.
- timr 15y ago"I think, is whether you can successfully identify the 5 vs 1000 when recruiting." Hm...I think the question is, can you do it reliably? Anyone can get lucky once, but we're talking about acquihires for tens of millions of dollars. You've gotta have a pretty high degree of confidence in your decision to shell out that kind of cash for the promise of the future productivity of a team. "A secondary open question would be whether an existing team of 5 who currently outperform some larger number tend to continually outperform them after being acquired." If the research cited in the article is to be believed, most super-stars cease being super-stars after acquisition. Maybe the odds get better for teams, but it sure seems like a lot of brilliant product teams get acquired by big companies (even "good" companies, like Google), never to be heard from again. This line of reasoning has always sounded like Valley Conventional Wisdom to me. Take a small, high-performing team and stuff it into a big bureaucracy, and the culture of the bureaucracy is going to win.