The Startup Empathy Dilemma: As power and impact grow, empathy diminishes
leowid.com
leowid.com
(but where's the line? I worked with a guy who wouldn't work for a company of more than a dozen people. I've looked at his linkedin over the years and indeed he worked for some phenomenal startups...but always left when the started to grow).
The number of individual channels of communication in a company hits 100 just past a dozen, which often makes it an inflection point for company culture and might affect why your acquaintance tends to leave at that point.
Up to ~15 people with experience and a common purpose, you can just all work together, little structure and roles, and stuff works OK. Teams form ad-hoc, based on problems.
From there, you need to define more well-defined roles, so people don't step all over each other. Communication starts being important, because everybody talking to everybody has broken down at that point. Hey, look, a wild manager appears.
You're a startup, you try to save on managers, so teams can easily balloon to ~20-30 under a single manager, but then it breaks down again. You realize you need a second manager.
As you approach 50, you want to add a third manager. At that point, you have, want it or not, a "leadership team". There needs to be very regular and deliberate communication. Policies start being set, because teams start drifiting apart.
You'll hit the next inflection point at 100-200 people. Because at that point, your leadership team is starting to hit communication limits at the leader-to-leader level. (Your leadership reaches the same initial inflection point your original team reached).
As that cascades up, you add layers. The problems keep repeating. The next hunk is at ~500 people. The "old hands" feel like the amount of people they don't know really outnumbers the people they know.
Those are the sizes I've personally seen happen, several times the same pattern. And based on that progression, I'd expect the next transition point at around ~1,500 people.
So it's not quite fibonacci - it seems to skip steps - but it's a good enough guide for the first few 100 people.
I wonder if this is present, at least for the same human-relationships reasons as the others.
It seems like there ought to be an upper bound past which people are basically disconnected and lack personal relationships to most of the organization, at which point those relationships become less relevant to structural issues. I guess the ~200 and ~500 problems will keep recurring within subgroups like divisions or offices, but excluding that it seems like non-social constraints might dominate.
At 1,000+ person companies, it seems like the problems I hear about are often structural (e.g. the contractors are treated as second-class citizens) or logistical (e.g. we can't get the bulk of the company to an all-hands, even once a year). At 10,000+, purely-statistical treatment of employees seems to take over, like IBM's systematic dismissal of older workers. (And resulting individual-level idiocy, like bringing back some of those essential workers as contractors at higher rates.)
Also, for large companies, you have separate social dynamics for offices. I've seen the 200/500 point happen in offices of much larger companies. You then layer the "too large to comprehend" dynamics on top of that, for added fun :)
(Also, you can get 1,000 people offsite. It's just a lot of work. That might be another of the 1,500 size problems)
Either way, social dynamics at large institutions is a fascinating problem. I wish I could find decent literature around the topic, because it's a fun subject :) (Corollary: All the things I said above are anecdata, I don't know if there's a theoretical foundation)
Whether military administration is much lower than business is another question, but it's an argument for smaller SoC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_organization#Commands...
I have a bit of trouble judging how Fibonacci compares, since the distinctions I've seen are gradual rather than nonlinear. But it does look like moving from ~15 to ~35 might match a switch from close-association to band structure, and exceeding ~55 would match another restructuring away from that.
Lieberman ought to more than I do, but his argument that "150 connections" can't be selected for because pre-agricultural bands were smaller seems ridiculous. Most fundamentally, because 150 doesn't have to be directly selected for; it's a consequence of working memory that might be valued for unrelated reasons. But more directly, because "bands of 30-50" is not "only knowing 30-50 people". Bands were usually extended family groups, so the value of maintaining personal relationships outside of those groups is obvious.
Honestly, the best I can work out is that Lieberman is a few decades out of date on his understanding of how pre-agricultural groups interacted.
You're very right about the mistake of looking only at company size; Dunbar suggested that maintaining the full connection set would take a very large amount of socialization time, and most people have at least some connections outside the office. Even anecdotally, there are lots of people who describe feeling disconnected at work because they spend more time than coworkers on non-work connections. This seems to have been ignored by a lot of people using the number. Wikipedia claims the Swedish tax service limits offices to 150 people based on Dunbar, but that could easily be 50 people too large for a workplace community. Malcolm Gladwell, for whatever his data is worth, claims that Gore-Tex hit cultural problems as offices grew beyond 150.
If those anecdotes are accurate, it implies offices function well with high rather than total connectivity. Intuitively, that seems quite reasonable. Cross-organization connections are valuable, but not every pair of jobs has equal value-from-connectivity. And small teams are infamously hard to build because everyone involved has to get along and agree on how to function. If you aim for 90% connectivity (or 50%, who knows) instead, it's possible to maintain a high-empathy organization while still allowing for personality conflicts.
The other part is that it's a company (a group of people) not just a corporation; while I am friendly with some clients and vendors (ones I worked on, either old ones or major ones) when we happen to hit it off, it's not the same as the company of people.
I went on a quick search to see if such a thing as "Winner's guilt" exists, and while it does appear to be a thing to some extent, I found not studies on it in a larger context. It seems to me that relating to people that are like your current state would probably be a good defense against that, psychologically.
That's because it's called survivor's guilt.
Somehow, I'd managed to shelter myself enough and live comfortably enough to where I stopped noticing less-fortunate people. It really depressed me, because I had previously thought of myself as a fairly empathetic person.
To help combat this I donate a fair amount of money ($50/month) to mental-health research and make a conscious effort to pay attention a bit more when I'm walking around.
I'm hardly a hyper-successful person, so I can't imagine how hard it would be to empathize if you're a multi-millionaire/billionaire.
EDIT: I know throwing money at a problem hardly counts as "solving" the empathy problem, but it does help me assuage some guilt.
A soup kitchen isn't a bad idea though. I will look into that.
EDIT: Doesn't look like I can delete, but I can chop out my email.
That said, a lot of homelessness happens as a result of mental illnesses like drug addiction or schizophrenia, or degenerative diseases like Alzheimers. It might be a pipe dream, but I would like to have as much research as possible to help treat these diseases, to (hopefully) help reduce these issues, perhaps by developing a cheap medication to reduce or eliminate the effects.
It's not something any of us are immune to; any of us could develop Alzheimers when we get older. I'm fortunate enough to have a lot of really cool friends and family that would take care of me if that happened, but not everyone is so lucky.
Those with mental illnesses who are also homeless are more visible, but the majority of those who are homeless are homeless because of financial reasons. And often, they're entire families.
For NYC[1]:
> Research shows that the primary cause of homelessness, particularly among families, is lack of affordable housing. Surveys of homeless families have identified the following major immediate, triggering causes of homelessness: eviction; doubled-up or severely overcrowded housing; domestic violence; job loss; and hazardous housing conditions.
[1] https://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/basic-facts-about-ho...