Inspired by a thread on HN incredulous about engineering headcount at a large software company: The biggest thing people don’t appreciate about large companies is the basic productive unit isn’t an individual it is an engineering team with about ~8 members.
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And you need one engineering team for everything you do. So if you do a lot of things, well, there you go. Some orgs have smaller scopes for a team. Some have larger. But if your business requires you to interface with mobile carriers in Southeast Asia, well, who owns that?
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Incidentally, you can trivially estimate the cost of an engineering team at single digit million dollars. There exist some services whose value prop is “If you use this, save yourself one engineering team or even an engineering sub org.” They’re all underpriced.
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What does “pay the organizational tax” mean?
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The overhead cost for maintaining the organization itself, everything from performance reviews to interviewing to attending all-hands meetings to expense reports to...
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Also very important... business continuity considerations. Spread the knowledge, increase redundancy.
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And of course employee welfare which you alluded to... Spread the load to rotate in/out of pressure periods (on call etc)
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Also, bus factor
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Oh boy Patrick, I'm currently doing all of those things as a single individual developer and how I wish I had 7 other people to coordinate with on this :)
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I don't think it's true that you *need* it as a function of size. It's a side effect of how we're used to working right now. Many of these orgs also have one person juggernauts who hold dozens of teams together by sheer force of will.
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