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This argument does not make much sense to me. If you pick only "the best" people by hand you could create a team with only excellent members of any size. All

This argument does not make much sense to me. If you pick only "the best" people by hand you could create a team with only excellent members of any size. All the statistical arguments become mot in such a scenario! You would get a team of only excellent people with a guarantied probability of 1, at any sample size.

Jensson 4y ago
Your argument doesn't work, nobody knows enough people to staff up a big company with only people they know. At some point they will have to go by surface signals or by word of mouth, talking to a person in an interview isn't enough. On the other hand for a small team, lets say 10 people, you could go back and pick the 10 best people you have worked with in your life. That will be a good team if you actually tries to get good people instead of people you like. That doesn't scale, other people will take people they like and quality suffers, it always happens at scale, but an individual kan make better choices.
- still_grokking 4y ago
  Yes, getting only "the best of the best" doesn't scale. I fully agree. But it also doesn't work for smaller teams, because people are people. Now we're back to my previous argument: The probability to get a team of only excellent (or terrible) people is near zero in reality independent of team size. Everything put together finally invalidates the original: > > Same thing happened with "small schools perform better" so they got funded. But turns out it's possible for them to perform terribly for the same reason it is for them to perform well. > Joint probability all members are either all excellent or all terrible is higher when the number of people is smaller. Trying to approach this conclusion by statistics just doesn't work as we see. But the non stochastic arguments why small teams are always in advantage, which I presented in my other post, hold.
  - hbrn 4y ago
    "Near zero" is an extremely misleading term. For small teams it's 0.1%. For large teams it's 0.001%. Both are near zero. But one is 100 times more likely than the other.

Jensson 4y ago

Your argument doesn't work, nobody knows enough people to staff up a big company with only people they know. At some point they will have to go by surface signals or by word of mouth, talking to a person in an interview isn't enough. On the other hand for a small team, lets say 10 people, you could go back and pick the 10 best people you have worked with in your life. That will be a good team if you actually tries to get good people instead of people you like. That doesn't scale, other people will take people they like and quality suffers, it always happens at scale, but an individual kan make better choices.

still_grokking 4y ago
Yes, getting only "the best of the best" doesn't scale. I fully agree. But it also doesn't work for smaller teams, because people are people. Now we're back to my previous argument: The probability to get a team of only excellent (or terrible) people is near zero in reality independent of team size. Everything put together finally invalidates the original: > > Same thing happened with "small schools perform better" so they got funded. But turns out it's possible for them to perform terribly for the same reason it is for them to perform well. > Joint probability all members are either all excellent or all terrible is higher when the number of people is smaller. Trying to approach this conclusion by statistics just doesn't work as we see. But the non stochastic arguments why small teams are always in advantage, which I presented in my other post, hold.
- hbrn 4y ago
  "Near zero" is an extremely misleading term. For small teams it's 0.1%. For large teams it's 0.001%. Both are near zero. But one is 100 times more likely than the other.