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Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

Service-oriented architecture is one reason why Amazon dove head-first into things that would lead them to create AWS.

Couple SOA with "two-pizza teams" (a team isn't any more larger than could be fed with two pizzas) and "single-threaded owners" (complete authority and autonomy to build or buy anything that meets business needs, even if it is duplicates efforts of another team), you've got yourself an org structure similar to that of Amazon's.

Refs: https://archive.is/lWPof | https://archive.is/tBpsj

Also: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/53138083-working-back...

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As someone who has been at amazon for a bit and has been a single threaded owner (STO) for a few different things, autonomy and authority part is largely overstated in many orgs. In reality, most groups still have cross-functional overhead to get folks to agree to anything in many of the orgs I've seen and you have slightly more weight on the matter but still are expected to get this cross-functional agreement in many cases since functional leaders still exist. I no longer believe the phrase STO when it's used unless this leader clearly has the cross-functional team members reporting to them as well or the authority to move quickly without having to talk to their senior management.

I always assumed STO was as much about “this person has only one job [rather than 50% on each of topics A and B]” as it was “this person can decide whatever they think is best for topic A”.

That's the single threaded part, but it is also meant to be the proper "owner" in order to move quickly, but the bigger organizations get, the less that part ever actually happens and instead you get decision by committee which is inherently slow and usually sub-optimal since all decisions are negotiations. This is also where my favorite jeff b. quote comes into play (though it is sadly ignored more and more nowadays): "even well meaning gatekeepers slow innovation"

Ah; thanks, that makes a ton of sense. We've struggled with both "halves" of that phrase at different times, but recently we've done better on the O and are still weak on the ST part, so I was overly-focused on the most acute painpoint for us.

TIL I'm almost a team by myself.

Two-pizza teams? How big are there pizzas in the US?!?

Let's say each pizza is eight slices, and each person eats two slices. So, a team should only ever be around eight people. Personally, as a former manager, I've found the sweet spot to be 6 people for software.

Not coincidentally we're centering around a similar number of cores per processor.

It varies, but a large pizza will generally be 14", 16" or 18". All three sizes seem to be commonly used, although 18" is generally more associated with New York or New York style pizzas; 14" is generally more associated with the big national chains.

Diameter of 14" = 35.6cm = an area of 993 cm^2.

Diameter of 16" = 40.6cm = an area of 1.3k cm^2.

Diameter of 18" = 45.7cm = an area of 1.6k cm^2.

And down thread someone from Germany says large pizzas there are 26cm, which would be an area of 531 cm^2. That's less than a third the size of an 18" pizza!

I once read somewhere that a two pizza team is 5-10 people.

So, I assume the pizzas in the US are pretty large.

Our "large" pizzas here in Germany have a diameter of 26cm. I usually eat one of those on my own.

> Our "large" pizzas here in Germany have a diameter of 26cm.

IME, That’s about a typical US small pizza (10”; large is typically 14” though I've seen places that use 12”/14”/16” S/M/L.)

12”/14”/16” ~> 30/35/41 cm. Also note that area is proportional to the square of the diameter.

Area of a circle is Pizza

Given a radius of z:

Pi•z•z=a

Gold

brilliant! source? or did you just make it up?

No — I think I read it on here some while back. So simple and easy to remember; I love it and love repeating it!

Seems to be regional then; a large pizza in my area is 32 cm.

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