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That sounds about right - for an English-language-only message board startup that mostly ignores laws outside of a 100-mile radius of the bay area. Narrowing f

That sounds about right - for an English-language-only message board startup that mostly ignores laws outside of a 100-mile radius of the bay area. Narrowing focus to just engineering: how would you allocate 24 engineers across infra (networking, storage, scaling), backend (API, features), web frontend, design, mobile (iOS & Android), security, ads & monetization, Abuse & internal tooling dev? Or would you allocate 1 or 2 individuals to each (working 60-80 hour weeks) rather than teams (3-5 people, minimum) + line-managers & product folk. Add QA and you realize "2 dozen engineers" isn't a lot, the devil is in the details. I was being charitable on 3-member teams: noone wants to be on an on-call roster that's only 3-engineers deep. Each of the areas I highlighted likely has multiple teams rather than just one (e.g. infra can be split into parthensized teams - networking, storage, operations/ops), and I intentionally completely ignored R&D functions.

Firmwarrior 3y ago
That's true. And each one of those teams is going to need intra-team support teams with a lot of enterprise project managers, product managers, technical project managers, stakeholders, directly responsible individuals. There's going to be schedules to manage, rollouts, release dates, code lockdowns. Build engineers, infrastructure to support the build engineers and the project managers. Engineers are going to be spending so much time in standups, meetings, pre-meeting meetups, all-hands, etc that they'll be lucky to get an unbroken hour a day to code at all. Before you know it you have 500 people doing a job that's entirely doable by a handful of hardworking people.
- sangnoir 3y ago
  > Before you know it you have 500 people doing a job that's entirely doable by a handful of hardworking people Perhaps the market rewards growth more than it does efficiency? I can't name a single company (post WhatsApp) that has users in the 9-plus-digit-range and has less than a thousand employees.
  - Firmwarrior 3y ago
    yeah, I think you're right It seems like investors prefer to have a large (but still profitable) org with a lot of redundancy and clear systems in place than an elite team of superheroes I'm just annoyed that Spez is running a bloated overweight organization, then using that fact to justify some user-hostile money grubbing
    - mbravorus 3y ago
      Nobody likes an elite team of superheroes for a _business_. Superheroes burn out, get hit by a bus, have limited affinity for creating good documentation, sometimes a tendency to be fascinated by shiny things, can get annoyed by a real or perceived <whatever> and quit or can be headhunted away. And then there goes your business. I dislike unnecessary bloat, be it in software or in org design, as much as the next guy, but staking your company's long-term future on superheroes (or superpowers, as it's for some inexplicable reason still fashionable to say) is a recipe for disaster.

Firmwarrior 3y ago

That's true. And each one of those teams is going to need intra-team support teams with a lot of enterprise project managers, product managers, technical project managers, stakeholders, directly responsible individuals. There's going to be schedules to manage, rollouts, release dates, code lockdowns. Build engineers, infrastructure to support the build engineers and the project managers. Engineers are going to be spending so much time in standups, meetings, pre-meeting meetups, all-hands, etc that they'll be lucky to get an unbroken hour a day to code at all. Before you know it you have 500 people doing a job that's entirely doable by a handful of hardworking people.

sangnoir 3y ago
> Before you know it you have 500 people doing a job that's entirely doable by a handful of hardworking people Perhaps the market rewards growth more than it does efficiency? I can't name a single company (post WhatsApp) that has users in the 9-plus-digit-range and has less than a thousand employees.
- Firmwarrior 3y ago
  yeah, I think you're right It seems like investors prefer to have a large (but still profitable) org with a lot of redundancy and clear systems in place than an elite team of superheroes I'm just annoyed that Spez is running a bloated overweight organization, then using that fact to justify some user-hostile money grubbing
  - mbravorus 3y ago
    Nobody likes an elite team of superheroes for a _business_. Superheroes burn out, get hit by a bus, have limited affinity for creating good documentation, sometimes a tendency to be fascinated by shiny things, can get annoyed by a real or perceived <whatever> and quit or can be headhunted away. And then there goes your business. I dislike unnecessary bloat, be it in software or in org design, as much as the next guy, but staking your company's long-term future on superheroes (or superpowers, as it's for some inexplicable reason still fashionable to say) is a recipe for disaster.