
The power of small teams - psogle
http://a.viary.com/bizblog/posts/the-power-of-small-teams
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kylec
The concept that smaller teams are more efficient is not new. I've been
reading The Mythical Man-Month and it makes this admission right out of the
gate. However, as the team gets smaller it also limits the size of the
projects it can take on. To that end, what the rest of the book is more or
less devoted to is how to do large projects with "small" teams by separating
orthogonal tasks and more efficiently organizing the communication structure.

In other words, read the book if you haven't already. ;)

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DaniFong
Predating this is 'A Pattern Language', by Christopher Alexander. It seems
that teams of < 8 are universally more productive, with ~5 being optimal (at
least in Japanese Culture). 'A Pattern Language' is intriguing and useful
because it uses real data, and sociological results, to deduce a theory, and
makes specific suggestions for architecture and the usage of space. For
example, it's suggested that people use converted homes for workspaces, due to
the large variation in room size and privacy, and the presence of places to
work, think, cook, eat, play, and relax. It also points out that smaller
meetings and workspaces are more productive, and supports this by showing a
graph of '% of people never to say anything' or 'ideas not expressed' versus
participants in a meeting).

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DarkShikari
I work for a startup now valued at around a quarter of a billion dollars
that's negotiating enormous deals with some of the largest providers out
there... and our entire development team can fit around a dinner table. In
fact, we have significantly more products than we have programmers! Our new
CTO, who previously worked at a much larger company, was utterly shocked when
he found that our massive product lineup was developed by such a small team.

There's also a huge benefit we gain from using existing open-source solutions
whenever possible--if you avoid NIH syndrome and stop trying to reinvent the
wheel, you can regain a huge amount of productivity.

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jlogic77
Growth is tough in general. A team getting larger forces a leader or leaders
to emerge. Not everyone can lead or manage. Not everyone takes direction well.
All separate skills from just being able to code or design.

Larger teams is where politics come in and where I don't want to be. Ideally I
only want to work in smaller teams.

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stcredzero
Put walls between people, and you'll need to hire more people to coordinate
them. Dirt basic common sense, yet one that most organizations have a hard
time with. That's a cultural issue. Everyone's allergic to working on tables.

Someone once wrote a comparison between DB2's architecture and Ingres. Both
are the exact same kind of application built on similar kinds of machines at
around the same time. Yet Ingres was built as 4 separate process. The Ingres
team was organized in 4 separate groups.

~~~
gruseom
That's a nice example of Conway's Law.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=82997>

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BrandonM
I find the author's assumptions that every idea stems from one individual and
must be (ineffectively) communicated to everyone else to be rather strange.
I'm all about small teams, and I personally prefer to work alone, but to
ignore the contributions that are offered by other members of the team is
folly. The "corruption [of ideas] at multiple points" that he mentions could
just as easily be interpreted as improvements on the idea.

~~~
jaxomlotus
Improvements are mutations that fill in the gaps where information is missing.
Some mutations might be improvements. Most aren't.

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OneSeventeen
Though the article was interesting, it's nothing that isn't said a lot:
quality communication is necessary and also hard; quality communication
between more people is commensurately harder.

On another note: the link to hitmeuplater.com was neat. I hadn't see it before
and think it's a cool idea.

~~~
jaxomlotus
Sure, but if you attend any demo type of conferences you'll see a lot of
entrepreneurs who brag about how they are growing their team out to 20 people
over the next x months. There's no justification offered as to whether those
people are actually needed... just the general "we're going to become a huge
company". It's like the startup equivalent of a penis measuring contest is
staff size (and don't get me started on funding raised).

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ojbyrne
Software development management is all about balancing "one is the ideal team
size" with "this project is going to take 200 man-years." You sacrifice
productivity in order to complete stuff in a reasonable time frame.

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KevBurnsJr
_Communication is actually bad. It inherently involves a loss of information._

Sounds to me like Avi is in the business of telling rather than being in the
business of doing.

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jaxomlotus
Er, you mean the opposite. There is no advocating telling, only doing, in this
article.

~~~
KevBurnsJr
I stick by what I said.

I believe communication to be the fountainhead of motivation and inspiration
in any functioning work environment.

I say that the author is in the business of telling rather than the business
of doing because anyone who is doing knows that it's their relationships with
those around them that keeps their limbs moving.

People were not born to be communicated _to_. Communication is not a one-way
street. The author's strategy is optimized for telling rather than sharing,
accounting in no way for the value of discussion, critique and collaboration.

A strategy of working in small teams can be great, but don't let its motivator
be to _cut out as many communication points of failure as possible_.

