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> Before long, a dedicated Slack channel was created, which accrued over 550+ messages representing opinions from every corner of the company. Another few thous
by ibash 2y ago
> Before long, a dedicated Slack channel was created, which accrued over 550+ messages representing opinions from every corner of the company. Another few thousand words and dozens of hours were spent in meetings discussing what we should add to the calculator to fix it.
This is a symptom of over hiring. Too many people removes agency.
When people lose sight of what's actually important and feel that they must reach consensus by committee then there are too many people.
- imoverclocked 2y ago> This is a symptom of over hiring. Perhaps. It's also a symptom of bike shedding which can happen with as few as two people.
- FridgeSeal 2y agoTrue, but at least the communication overhead between 2 people, and the time for them to either agree, compromise, or punt, can be a lot lower, which is a significant win for getting things done.
- andyferris 2y agoAs few as one - I'm pretty sure I manage that all on my own sometimes!
- Osiris 2y agoHow did you reach the conclusion that the company has too many employees from that one sentence?
- ibash 2y agoTwo lines of reasoning. First: A lot of time was spent building consensus. No individual felt they had unilateral power to remove the calculator. Instead the behavior was to seek approval. That's probably because of unclear ownership, which often happens because of too many people. Second: Too many cooks in the kitchen. At any stage of a company there's a limited amount of important work. Work that is mission critical and provides outsized value to the company. When people feel their own work is not important they seek other work that appears to be important. So, you get the behavior of a lot of opinions on a pricing calculator.
- pushupentry1219 2y agoThe company I work for has cut staff by 60%, and workload has not decreased. This is standard corporate shittery, however my point here is that we still have the issue of unclear ownership even on basically skeleton staff. It's not a question of individual ownership, it's about what team owns it in my case.
- jayd16 2y agoIt's at least what happens when you run a design discussion in a channel with the whole company. Even design by committee is limited to the committee.