3 ms·

Fairly recently I moved from a company of about 8,000 to a company of 54 or so. At first I wondered how the tiny company got anything done, but they've been aro

Fairly recently I moved from a company of about 8,000 to a company of 54 or so. At first I wondered how the tiny company got anything done, but they've been around for 30 years so I figured they must have some skill. Now I wonder what the hell all those 8,000 people actually did. Each team you just named is 1-2 people at the current gig.

bogota 4y ago
That really doesn’t say anything. Those teams all do very different thinks depending on the problem space. You’re not really making an argument though you are just stating two situations and hoping people arrive at your conclusion of big company is stupid.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  I think anyone who has interacted with a big organization (company, government, religion, etc...) comes to the conclusion that they're disfunctional in some way. I agree that it doesn't say much, but I do wonder, how many engineers built the original Uber app and how many does the company employee today? I'm betting it's more, and I wonder how much additional functionality they've added over the years.
MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
I work a startup with less than 15 technical employees and have experience at tech companies ranging from 100s to 100s of thousands of employees. Suggesting that one could accomplish or maintain a platform like uber with so few heads is a farce.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  A team of 15 probably couldn't. A team of 50-100 probably could maintain something of similar complexity to the core uber app. Copycats exist using many fewer resources.
  - menzoic 4y ago
    Copycats don't operate at nearly the same scale as Uber. Even Lyft operates on a significantly smaller scale than Uber.
  - airbreather 4y ago
    I suspect you need a minimum sized team for each country, due to localisation associated with language, regulations, tax etc etc.
  - claydolatry 4y ago
    How many countries would this be offered in? Would you shut down your service outside of US business hours or will your 50-100 person staff not need sleep?
Hermitian909 4y ago
Having gone through some of these scaling issues. Three things pop out: 1. With more customers, you find your code is much buggier than you thought. Most code has a long-tail of weirds bugs that may be a non-issue at current scale but absolutely crippling by just increasing the number of users by 1-2 orders of magnitude. 2. As you increase the number of business functions within the company, cohesion breaks down. People start losing more and more context and you start needing full time jobs just to keep everyone pushing in the same direction without stepping on each others toes. I don't know you in particular, but most engineers seem oblivious to how many business functions a company trying to operate internationally often needs. 3. As engineers, there's often a wall between us and huge amount of effort that goes into sales, marketing, and customer service (even if the last is only provided to enterprises). One way to keep headcount down is keep this to a minimum, but you're usually leaving most of your profits on the table.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  Indeed, we're nowhere near the scale of Uber. We have a few thousand users supported by 7 developers, 2 ops people (one is me) and 7 in customer support who provide 24/7 support with an on-call rotation. If we increased our users by an order of magnitude or two, I doubt we'd need to increase headcount by anything near that much. I'm told really effective companies like Netflix are quite skilled at leveraging technology to scale out their platforms with very agile (read small) teams. I don't think we're anywhere near on par with Netflix, but we can read their engineering blog ;) My previous role in the big company was actually post-sales customer support so I'm actually pretty familiar with those functions and somewhat aware of all the coordination and power politics that come with increasing numbers of people - there's a reason I'm trying something pretty different these days. And so far, I have to say I'm happier with the surroundings.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    > We have a few thousand users > If we increased our users by an order of magnitude or two, I doubt we'd need to increase headcount by anything near that much Two orders of magnitude would land you with a few hundred thousand users. Uber has ~93 million users in 80 countries. Just supporting payments in all those countries is a full-time job for a dedicated team.
airbreather 4y ago
I have seen how it multiplies out in traditional engineering. One guy/girl was doing stuff, might be quite a bit, so it's decided it is really needing 2.something people, so they send two more, because you can't have part of a person. Then they need a manager, and a doc controller and maybe an admin. Then the service people need a manager, and you need a manager of the managers, and they needs an assistant and who knows who else, maybe a HR and next thing know what one person was doing is all of a sudden a ten person team. And instead of going to just talk to someone in another team, it's no "my manager will confirm with your manager" etc etc I worked in one place where to send a document to the guy in the next office from me for official review had to go through a document control office in a another country. That was not unusual, apart from being unusually frustrating and time wasting.
lazide 4y ago
The bigger the organization, the more calories have to be burned to keep the organization from flying apart at the seams, and the core value producing parts from being eaten, confused/mislead, or destroyed. At big organizations, it’s often 90% or more of all work the entire organization is doing (depending on how you calculate kt).

bogota 4y ago

That really doesn’t say anything. Those teams all do very different thinks depending on the problem space. You’re not really making an argument though you are just stating two situations and hoping people arrive at your conclusion of big company is stupid.

hotpotamus 4y ago
I think anyone who has interacted with a big organization (company, government, religion, etc...) comes to the conclusion that they're disfunctional in some way. I agree that it doesn't say much, but I do wonder, how many engineers built the original Uber app and how many does the company employee today? I'm betting it's more, and I wonder how much additional functionality they've added over the years.

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago

I work a startup with less than 15 technical employees and have experience at tech companies ranging from 100s to 100s of thousands of employees. Suggesting that one could accomplish or maintain a platform like uber with so few heads is a farce.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
A team of 15 probably couldn't. A team of 50-100 probably could maintain something of similar complexity to the core uber app. Copycats exist using many fewer resources.
- menzoic 4y ago
  Copycats don't operate at nearly the same scale as Uber. Even Lyft operates on a significantly smaller scale than Uber.
- airbreather 4y ago
  I suspect you need a minimum sized team for each country, due to localisation associated with language, regulations, tax etc etc.
- claydolatry 4y ago
  How many countries would this be offered in? Would you shut down your service outside of US business hours or will your 50-100 person staff not need sleep?

Hermitian909 4y ago

Having gone through some of these scaling issues. Three things pop out: 1. With more customers, you find your code is much buggier than you thought. Most code has a long-tail of weirds bugs that may be a non-issue at current scale but absolutely crippling by just increasing the number of users by 1-2 orders of magnitude. 2. As you increase the number of business functions within the company, cohesion breaks down. People start losing more and more context and you start needing full time jobs just to keep everyone pushing in the same direction without stepping on each others toes. I don't know you in particular, but most engineers seem oblivious to how many business functions a company trying to operate internationally often needs. 3. As engineers, there's often a wall between us and huge amount of effort that goes into sales, marketing, and customer service (even if the last is only provided to enterprises). One way to keep headcount down is keep this to a minimum, but you're usually leaving most of your profits on the table.

hotpotamus 4y ago
Indeed, we're nowhere near the scale of Uber. We have a few thousand users supported by 7 developers, 2 ops people (one is me) and 7 in customer support who provide 24/7 support with an on-call rotation. If we increased our users by an order of magnitude or two, I doubt we'd need to increase headcount by anything near that much. I'm told really effective companies like Netflix are quite skilled at leveraging technology to scale out their platforms with very agile (read small) teams. I don't think we're anywhere near on par with Netflix, but we can read their engineering blog ;) My previous role in the big company was actually post-sales customer support so I'm actually pretty familiar with those functions and somewhat aware of all the coordination and power politics that come with increasing numbers of people - there's a reason I'm trying something pretty different these days. And so far, I have to say I'm happier with the surroundings.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > We have a few thousand users > If we increased our users by an order of magnitude or two, I doubt we'd need to increase headcount by anything near that much Two orders of magnitude would land you with a few hundred thousand users. Uber has ~93 million users in 80 countries. Just supporting payments in all those countries is a full-time job for a dedicated team.

airbreather 4y ago

I have seen how it multiplies out in traditional engineering. One guy/girl was doing stuff, might be quite a bit, so it's decided it is really needing 2.something people, so they send two more, because you can't have part of a person. Then they need a manager, and a doc controller and maybe an admin. Then the service people need a manager, and you need a manager of the managers, and they needs an assistant and who knows who else, maybe a HR and next thing know what one person was doing is all of a sudden a ten person team. And instead of going to just talk to someone in another team, it's no "my manager will confirm with your manager" etc etc I worked in one place where to send a document to the guy in the next office from me for official review had to go through a document control office in a another country. That was not unusual, apart from being unusually frustrating and time wasting.

lazide 4y ago

The bigger the organization, the more calories have to be burned to keep the organization from flying apart at the seams, and the core value producing parts from being eaten, confused/mislead, or destroyed. At big organizations, it’s often 90% or more of all work the entire organization is doing (depending on how you calculate kt).