4 ms·

1975 called. They'd like to loan you their copy of the Mythical Man-Month. So to be clear: If all of those were SWEs, that would be 2,268 people to introduce b

1975 called. They'd like to loan you their copy of the Mythical Man-Month. So to be clear: If all of those were SWEs, that would be 2,268 people to introduce bugs, and roughly 2.5M potential social links / interactions (and communications overhead). The issue queue is what results. Most projects are best done by about 2-10 person teams. That's about where you can maintain architectural coherence. Beyond 20, architectural coherence becomes impossible.

999900000999 2y ago
So would the perfect GitHub/GitLab competitor be a 20 person team of highly paid engineers ( 400K USD straight cash comp) with outsourced marketing and HR ? I actually think most companies, particularly when VCs are pumping them full of capital, overhire. I guess this is to signal to the market we're doing cool things...
- frognumber 2y ago
  From a purely "winning in the market" perspective, I think there-abouts. For optimal, I might go up a little bit more, since there are multiple products, but not a lot more. Some of the CI/CD stuff is pretty disconnected from the core product. There are very, very strong individual pressures to overhire. "I managed a 500-person team" sounds a lot better on a resume or otherwise than "I managed a 5-person team" (even if the 5-person team did more). I also wouldn't go all cash. I'd do the normal $150-$200k cash, and the rest in equity. I'd be very, very generous with equity. There are also time pressures, whereas many things take time to build. 5 people x 4 years >> 20 people x 1 year, at least if kept productive (which is sometimes hard with longer timelines)
  - 999900000999 2y ago
    For a startup I'd prefer my cash up front to be honest. I'm now thinking if elite companies ( no juniors , pay starts at 300k to 400k, no fluff) would generally out compete bigger organizations.
nikau 2y ago
I think its likely too late for gitlab, their code seems to suffer from poor outset design and has been hacked at too much. The fact there are 4 generations of job dependency tags alone must be a quagmire to modify.

999900000999 2y ago

So would the perfect GitHub/GitLab competitor be a 20 person team of highly paid engineers ( 400K USD straight cash comp) with outsourced marketing and HR ? I actually think most companies, particularly when VCs are pumping them full of capital, overhire. I guess this is to signal to the market we're doing cool things...

frognumber 2y ago
From a purely "winning in the market" perspective, I think there-abouts. For optimal, I might go up a little bit more, since there are multiple products, but not a lot more. Some of the CI/CD stuff is pretty disconnected from the core product. There are very, very strong individual pressures to overhire. "I managed a 500-person team" sounds a lot better on a resume or otherwise than "I managed a 5-person team" (even if the 5-person team did more). I also wouldn't go all cash. I'd do the normal $150-$200k cash, and the rest in equity. I'd be very, very generous with equity. There are also time pressures, whereas many things take time to build. 5 people x 4 years >> 20 people x 1 year, at least if kept productive (which is sometimes hard with longer timelines)
- 999900000999 2y ago
  For a startup I'd prefer my cash up front to be honest. I'm now thinking if elite companies ( no juniors , pay starts at 300k to 400k, no fluff) would generally out compete bigger organizations.

nikau 2y ago

I think its likely too late for gitlab, their code seems to suffer from poor outset design and has been hacked at too much. The fact there are 4 generations of job dependency tags alone must be a quagmire to modify.