3 ms·

> And I was thinking "not even!" It's been my experience that scaling up employee count, has diminishing returns, with even some net negatives with some adds.

> And I was thinking "not even!" It's been my experience that scaling up employee count, has diminishing returns, with even some net negatives with some adds. That's fair, but I don't think you're going to hit that from 1 -> 2. It's been my experience that 4-5 is where the diminishing returns start really happening and a complete loss of gain at around 4-8. > So why is this? Why does it work in computing, but not with people? Is it the nature of the tasks (one is problem solving, the other is grinding out computations?). With a worker (computer) the task has generally been completely defined before the task starts. Tasks done by human workers generally require a portion of "deciding how to do the thing". Assuming that requires full team meetings, on a team of 8, it requires 8 times as many meetings for 8 people and each meeting taking up 8 times the number of people's time (~64x time loss). this is compared to a hypothetical "1 person meeting", which would probably just be someone sitting around thinking about the best way to do something

neogodless 4y ago
> Assuming that requires full team meetings, on a team of 8, it requires 8 times as many meetings for 8 people and each meeting taking up 8 times the number of people's time (~64x time loss). Wait, I don't think that's how work and meetings work. At least, I really hope not. It hasn't been in my experience, thank goodness!
- ByteJockey 4y ago
  > Wait, I don't think that's how work and meetings work. I'm not including all of the things that come up that don't require a team meeting. But if we're assuming that something is discovered that requires a full team meeting by each employee roughly once a week (number pulled straight out of my ass, feel free to sub in your own, the math doesn't depend on this), that's 8 meetings a week for the 8 person team (totaling roughly 64 hours), and only 4/4 for the team of 4. This is, of course, assuming the rate of discovery of things discovered requiring a meeting remain constant as the team increases. In my experience, this is not the case, and it usually tends to increase as people lose track of what everyone else is doing, there's an increased need to "re-sync". I believe this increased need is what drives it from exponential (in my naive answer) to the combinatorial (in practice) increase people usually quote when throwing around Brooks' Law.

neogodless 4y ago

> Assuming that requires full team meetings, on a team of 8, it requires 8 times as many meetings for 8 people and each meeting taking up 8 times the number of people's time (~64x time loss). Wait, I don't think that's how work and meetings work. At least, I really hope not. It hasn't been in my experience, thank goodness!

ByteJockey 4y ago
> Wait, I don't think that's how work and meetings work. I'm not including all of the things that come up that don't require a team meeting. But if we're assuming that something is discovered that requires a full team meeting by each employee roughly once a week (number pulled straight out of my ass, feel free to sub in your own, the math doesn't depend on this), that's 8 meetings a week for the 8 person team (totaling roughly 64 hours), and only 4/4 for the team of 4. This is, of course, assuming the rate of discovery of things discovered requiring a meeting remain constant as the team increases. In my experience, this is not the case, and it usually tends to increase as people lose track of what everyone else is doing, there's an increased need to "re-sync". I believe this increased need is what drives it from exponential (in my naive answer) to the combinatorial (in practice) increase people usually quote when throwing around Brooks' Law.