3 ms·
I guess this is a recurring one: I complained, but I eventually gave in. As we grew, it was harder and harder to maintain our informal processes. (I remember a
by DanielRibeiro 13y ago
I guess this is a recurring one:
I complained, but I eventually gave in. As we grew, it was harder and harder to maintain our informal processes. (I remember a real inflection point at about 50-60 employees, and another at about 100.) We gradually gave up our homegrown way of doing things, and accepted normal HR practices — vacation and sick days, regular reviews, annual salary adjustments — and bit by bit, I let the “HR professionals” take over the job of framing and managing the internal culture. That was a mistake.
The original process reminded me of Bryan Cantril's (bcantrill on Hacker News[1], creator of DTrace and VP of Engineering at Joyent) recent post on Leadership without Management: Scaling Organizations by Scaling Engineers[2], and of Yshan Wong's (former director of engineering at Facebook, and current CEO of Reddit) writtings on the topic[3].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bcantrill https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bcantrill
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6387649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6387649
[3] http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/engineering-management-process.html http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/engineering-management-process...
- agumonkey 13y agoI wonder if there were companies that instead of growing as a single entity created early spin-offs to diversify aside without losing the core spirit. It's so common to see success become bloated and resist death by all commercial means necessary while newcomers bring something fresh to the table.
- hugs 13y agoI've wondered for a long time if that's exactly why George Lucas intentionally created separate companies while he made all his movies (e.g. ILM, Lucasfilm, LucasArts, THX, Pixar). I wonder if there's either a good book that goes into detail about that, or if anyone on HN knows him close enough to ask him directly. :-)
- eatmyshorts 13y agoIt could be an implicit understanding of Dunbar's number - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number
- agumonkey 13y agoI remember being told about some companies and government agencies built under 150, but never heard Dunbar's name. Thanks
- rubinelli 13y agoYou will probably find this book interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maverick_%28book%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maverick_%28book%29 There are a few other companies organized as "business cells", but Semco is relatively well-known.
- easytiger 13y agoDunbar's number is interesting. His methods were not particularly scientific but his language was. It was a fairly formative paper for me when i was studying history of science. I do think there is something in the number, but where it comes from is unclear.
- hugs 13y agoExactly! My favorite pop culture explanation of Dunbar's number is "What is the Monkeysphere?" by David Wong in Cracked.com (http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html)
- yuhong 13y agoIt reminds me of michaelochurch's posts on open allocation.
- mbesto 13y agoIn my humble experience, 50 employees is make or break for most companies. My theory is that it's because once you hit 50 people, you begin to get the "who's that" effect.