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Comment by tropshop | Hacker News Reader

What do hyper-productive teams look like these days? I've always been part of small teams, with only a few true workhorses, joined by other filler bodies. Productivity was mostly a mystery to management.

I do not understand team sizes of 50+ for some web app product. The formula only requires a few (3) workhorses that make up a collaboration of skills in product design and engineering, and finding ways to keep them curious. Add a junior position if a workhorse is keen on mentorship.

Why take on such high risk with a large team?

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It is the same formula... they just have a lot more filler bodies. These large team sizes are at companies that decided to fix the issue of finding good people by throwing money at the problem. If you hire enough people you're bound to get a few competent ones.

Believe it or not, there are large teams with a vast majority of competent people.

For an average investor a "1000-employee company" sounds much more impressive than "10-employee company", even if the revenue is the same and the rest 990 folks are browsing catgifs most of the time. Kinda like hiring film extras.

My view is that team size should scale with the number of parallelizable features your company wants you to do. If you come to me with one or two at a time, I'm going to want a team of 4, maybe 5 max, people - I don't want more than 3 people swarming on many features, the communication and coordination overhead becomes increasingly high. But if you can give me three to five distinctive things to work on (even if they're in the same codebase) I can find informal "subteams" (with allocation changing as the features change) within the team to own those different areas, and scale up to double digits or more, as they only have to coordinate with the other features at the edges.

But you still gotta pay off your tech debt or it all goes to hell quickly and then you're hiring like mad because changing anything is a herculean task and management is like "just hire more people and get it done faster!"

Agreed, communication overhead starts to suck productivity out and areas start siloing off. I think anywhere between 3-5 is a sweet spot.

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