6 ms·

Counterpoint: Being on a small team in a large organization sucks. In a large org, small teams have no weight. Actually, we have wait - we have to wait for eve

by psim1 2y ago

Counterpoint: Being on a small team in a large organization sucks. In a large org, small teams have no weight. Actually, we have wait - we have to wait for everything: devops resources, marketing resources, even infosec resources. We are too small to notice, not important enough to get quick attention (never mind that our small team's product is profitable).

hobs 2y ago
Also a fundamental property of small teams (which can be good) is you can only commit to so much. You absolutely know you wont ever build a lasting bridge with a six person team, but you could ford a river. This type of stuff is ok when you are in startup mode but doing this long term at big companies creates a lot of existential risk that could be mitigated by better planning. This is a tradeoff some people make knowingly (like the posthog post clearly lays out) but as usual this "2 pizza team" is cargo culted way too hard. In many cases I see the product folks with the same vision regardless of the team sizes or org fit.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Put another way there is only so much you can do with a small team—and a small company. Things change as you grow. You can do more/bigger things but efficiency almost certainly takes a hit.
tonyarkles 2y ago
One of the most interesting discussions I've had around this was at a small company who mass-hired a bunch of people from a big company. We went round and round in circles for a while because of issues similar to what you're describing. I ran a small 4-6 person hardware team (softly blurry on the edges) and the new people wanted significant amounts of design and documentation review as well as financial oversight. We needed $40 worth of solder and connectors and had to wait a week for PO approval as well as demonstrate that we had gotten multiple quotes... even though there was just a store down the block that sold exactly what we needed. Anyway, after a month or two of this I started catching significant flak because my team was nowhere near as productive as it used to be. Complaining about slow POs was met with "maybe you should plan better". Complaining about design reviews for one-off boards that would go from idea-to-problem solved was met with "you're engineers, you need to document your work". It was painful and I came very close to resigning. What ultimately worked, though, was figuring out a catch phrase that spoke the language of the new people: "accountability without authority". This ruffled some feathers but once I repeated "you are trying to hold me accountable for delivering a $500,000 project on time but are not giving me authority to buy $40 worth of stuff to execute on that" enough times it finally got through and the system started to change. But man did it suck for a while.
- al_borland 2y ago
  This kind of stuff drives me nuts. I just spent 8 months fighting to get $150 for something. This should have just been taken out of some petty cash fund, but instead I wasted a ton of my time, and others, fighting to get it from the proper source. This cost the organization thousands of dollars in lost time.
  - goosejuice 2y ago
    I think this is all too common due to a small few who take advantage which leads to the construction of barriers to prevent abuse. This isn't limited to large orgs -- it's everywhere in society. I suspect accountability without authority might not be as accurate as one might seem when there exists middle management. You might be accountable but your boss probably is more so, thus the reluctance in giving full autonomy. They of course won't be able to take credit in that case either :). Perhaps an overly cynical view I admit.
    - vbezhenar 2y ago
      If barriers harm more than abuse then abuse should be accepted.
      - loupol 2y ago
        Reminds me of that bits about money blogpost title : "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero"
        Cyphase 2y ago
        https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fraud/ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32701913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32701913
        OJFord 2y ago
        Matt Levine has a recurring bit on this in Money Stuff too, adjusting the crime/fraud/risk dial back and forth as companies decide to do more or less compliance.
dheera 2y ago
> not important enough to get quick attention If you are essential to the company, it is on the company to give you the resources you ask for, or they are asses. If you have to waste time fighting for them, to the point where work can't get done, that is their problem. If you are non-essential to the company, then it is on you to start looking for a place where you will be essential, either internally or externally.
crtified 2y ago
This reminds me of a situation which I'll label "satellite office syndrome" - which is where a company has a large/dominant Head Office, and smaller regional offices which are in a permanent state of playing second-fiddle in terms of funding, attention, respect and company culture.
- kjellsbells 2y ago
  This is as true with products as with locations. For example, the people doing S3 at Amazon get everything they need, because that is a blockbuster product...and the people doing, oh I dont know, Greengrass IoT are waayyy down the totem pole even though it might be a perfectly profitable product. Large orgs tend to have a Roman Empire feel to them for most of the people, most of the time. You're stuck out on the edge of the empire, minding Hadrian's Wall, proud to be a Roman but also far, far away from any influence over or interest from the Emperor. If you are lucky they leave you alone. Occasionally a missive arrives from Rome that you have to decipher and implement no matter whether it makes sense or not. Fun times.
  - com 2y ago
    I thought that metaphor would go in a different direction, tbh. I was thinking “praetorian guards”, “imperial decline”, “decadence”, “barbariand resettling inside the limes” etc.
wildzzz 2y ago
That's when you need an advocate in upper management. You aren't going to get shit for funding even if your PM is well liked and your product idea is well thought out and solid. Someone in the circle of the one who signs the checks needs to be able to talk about your product like it's the next best thing. They also need to have the connections with their counterpart at the customer's offices to be able to sell the idea to their boss, "I've heard that company X is working on some new development for Y. If we invest, we could get first dibs on using it in our flagship product." Good ideas need to flow up to be given money. Likewise, Ideas that flow down almost always end up being a boondoggle, "Let's make a box that does X, Y, and Z, get the engineers on that right now!". If your good idea doesn't have an advocate, it will die on the vine and someone else will do it instead. What's the point of spending a bunch of money investing in an idea when a competitor got customers to invest in R&D for the same idea for free? Unfortunately, your advocate is probably not going to be a technical person. They won't understand the bits and bytes that make it novel, they need a soundbite that they can easily regurgitate ("We can shrink the current production design to draw X% less resources for the same or less money.") You could be the smartest guy at the company, have the most well rounded team, have a PM that orchestrates people like a symphony conductor, and have a huge idea that would make absolute bank for the company but your idea won't matter for shit if you can't sell it.
baron816 2y ago
But the advantage to being blocked all the time is that you can then go find other places to add value. Having impact outside of your small team is huge when it comes to performance reviews and promotions, especially if it’s self driven. But you can’t do that kind of stuff if you have other high priority work in your teams backlog that you can freely pick up.
osigurdson 2y ago
I think the primary idea of a small team is that it is self-sufficient and avoids the N^2 problem associated with everyone talking to everyone.
- seadan83 2y ago
  N choose two, not N^2. The latter double counts and also counts people communicating with themselves. For example, with 2 people, it is not 4 paths of communication, but just 1. N choose two is n*(n-1)/2, which yields the right answer In asymptotic analysis, they are the same. Except, that analysis does not make sense, asymptotic refers to the growth of the function as values approach effectively infinite
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

by psim1 2y ago

hobs 2y ago

Also a fundamental property of small teams (which can be good) is you can only commit to so much. You absolutely know you wont ever build a lasting bridge with a six person team, but you could ford a river. This type of stuff is ok when you are in startup mode but doing this long term at big companies creates a lot of existential risk that could be mitigated by better planning. This is a tradeoff some people make knowingly (like the posthog post clearly lays out) but as usual this "2 pizza team" is cargo culted way too hard. In many cases I see the product folks with the same vision regardless of the team sizes or org fit.

ghaff 2y ago
Put another way there is only so much you can do with a small team—and a small company. Things change as you grow. You can do more/bigger things but efficiency almost certainly takes a hit.

tonyarkles 2y ago

One of the most interesting discussions I've had around this was at a small company who mass-hired a bunch of people from a big company. We went round and round in circles for a while because of issues similar to what you're describing. I ran a small 4-6 person hardware team (softly blurry on the edges) and the new people wanted significant amounts of design and documentation review as well as financial oversight. We needed $40 worth of solder and connectors and had to wait a week for PO approval as well as demonstrate that we had gotten multiple quotes... even though there was just a store down the block that sold exactly what we needed. Anyway, after a month or two of this I started catching significant flak because my team was nowhere near as productive as it used to be. Complaining about slow POs was met with "maybe you should plan better". Complaining about design reviews for one-off boards that would go from idea-to-problem solved was met with "you're engineers, you need to document your work". It was painful and I came very close to resigning. What ultimately worked, though, was figuring out a catch phrase that spoke the language of the new people: "accountability without authority". This ruffled some feathers but once I repeated "you are trying to hold me accountable for delivering a $500,000 project on time but are not giving me authority to buy $40 worth of stuff to execute on that" enough times it finally got through and the system started to change. But man did it suck for a while.

al_borland 2y ago
This kind of stuff drives me nuts. I just spent 8 months fighting to get $150 for something. This should have just been taken out of some petty cash fund, but instead I wasted a ton of my time, and others, fighting to get it from the proper source. This cost the organization thousands of dollars in lost time.
- goosejuice 2y ago
  I think this is all too common due to a small few who take advantage which leads to the construction of barriers to prevent abuse. This isn't limited to large orgs -- it's everywhere in society. I suspect accountability without authority might not be as accurate as one might seem when there exists middle management. You might be accountable but your boss probably is more so, thus the reluctance in giving full autonomy. They of course won't be able to take credit in that case either :). Perhaps an overly cynical view I admit.
  - vbezhenar 2y ago
    If barriers harm more than abuse then abuse should be accepted.
    - loupol 2y ago
      Reminds me of that bits about money blogpost title : "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero"
      - Cyphase 2y ago
        https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fraud/ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32701913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32701913
      - OJFord 2y ago
        Matt Levine has a recurring bit on this in Money Stuff too, adjusting the crime/fraud/risk dial back and forth as companies decide to do more or less compliance.

dheera 2y ago

> not important enough to get quick attention If you are essential to the company, it is on the company to give you the resources you ask for, or they are asses. If you have to waste time fighting for them, to the point where work can't get done, that is their problem. If you are non-essential to the company, then it is on you to start looking for a place where you will be essential, either internally or externally.

crtified 2y ago

This reminds me of a situation which I'll label "satellite office syndrome" - which is where a company has a large/dominant Head Office, and smaller regional offices which are in a permanent state of playing second-fiddle in terms of funding, attention, respect and company culture.

kjellsbells 2y ago
This is as true with products as with locations. For example, the people doing S3 at Amazon get everything they need, because that is a blockbuster product...and the people doing, oh I dont know, Greengrass IoT are waayyy down the totem pole even though it might be a perfectly profitable product. Large orgs tend to have a Roman Empire feel to them for most of the people, most of the time. You're stuck out on the edge of the empire, minding Hadrian's Wall, proud to be a Roman but also far, far away from any influence over or interest from the Emperor. If you are lucky they leave you alone. Occasionally a missive arrives from Rome that you have to decipher and implement no matter whether it makes sense or not. Fun times.
- com 2y ago
  I thought that metaphor would go in a different direction, tbh. I was thinking “praetorian guards”, “imperial decline”, “decadence”, “barbariand resettling inside the limes” etc.

wildzzz 2y ago

That's when you need an advocate in upper management. You aren't going to get shit for funding even if your PM is well liked and your product idea is well thought out and solid. Someone in the circle of the one who signs the checks needs to be able to talk about your product like it's the next best thing. They also need to have the connections with their counterpart at the customer's offices to be able to sell the idea to their boss, "I've heard that company X is working on some new development for Y. If we invest, we could get first dibs on using it in our flagship product." Good ideas need to flow up to be given money. Likewise, Ideas that flow down almost always end up being a boondoggle, "Let's make a box that does X, Y, and Z, get the engineers on that right now!". If your good idea doesn't have an advocate, it will die on the vine and someone else will do it instead. What's the point of spending a bunch of money investing in an idea when a competitor got customers to invest in R&D for the same idea for free? Unfortunately, your advocate is probably not going to be a technical person. They won't understand the bits and bytes that make it novel, they need a soundbite that they can easily regurgitate ("We can shrink the current production design to draw X% less resources for the same or less money.") You could be the smartest guy at the company, have the most well rounded team, have a PM that orchestrates people like a symphony conductor, and have a huge idea that would make absolute bank for the company but your idea won't matter for shit if you can't sell it.

baron816 2y ago

But the advantage to being blocked all the time is that you can then go find other places to add value. Having impact outside of your small team is huge when it comes to performance reviews and promotions, especially if it’s self driven. But you can’t do that kind of stuff if you have other high priority work in your teams backlog that you can freely pick up.

osigurdson 2y ago

I think the primary idea of a small team is that it is self-sufficient and avoids the N^2 problem associated with everyone talking to everyone.

seadan83 2y ago
N choose two, not N^2. The latter double counts and also counts people communicating with themselves. For example, with 2 people, it is not 4 paths of communication, but just 1. N choose two is n*(n-1)/2, which yields the right answer In asymptotic analysis, they are the same. Except, that analysis does not make sense, asymptotic refers to the growth of the function as values approach effectively infinite

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]