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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

It's worse even than that. "At most linearly" is someone's idea of subtle irony. You only get linearity if you discover the existing team is less capable than the newly added members, or you're asleep and this is a dream.

If the value of new people diminishes logarithmicly, or much more likely, at the square root of the number of people, you must tackle tasks that a smaller team could not. Otherwise you'll be out-competed by a handful of smaller competitors.

Yes, you can do things a smaller team couldn't do, but you don't really have a choice, if you want to survive.

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So that's neat, but not what I was saying.

This is completely the wrong way to think about division of labour.

We started to figure this out 300 years ago for god's sake.

It's not helpful think about our tasks as a series of bits of work to be accomplished that we hire spigot-workers to do. White collar work is mostly not labour in that sense.

Thinking about your organization like a CPU doing calculations is utterly the wrong analogy.

More like band, playing a song - most tasks have some level of optimal participation you don't want to be below or over, and/or it might be incrementally harder to improve quality depending on variables. And 'talent' usually matters more than anything.

We started to figure this out 12,000+ years ago at the dawn of civilization, when specializations finally show up in the archeological records.

If you want to build a cart you need a woodworker and a couple of blacksmiths feeding your cartwright the proper materials. You’re right that five blacksmiths won’t get the cart built faster, but there’s a whole world of items, including in software, that are composites of anywhere from a handful to a hundred specialties.

I don’t feel like you’ve countered my theory about the need for higher order creation. Someone somewhere had to look at how many musical instruments there were in the world and think, “composer” and “conductor”, which not only gave you a job but suddenly put a bunch of musicians to work.

> You only get linearity if you discover the existing team is less capable than the newly added members

Could you explain your reasoning? This doesn't seem right to me. If you have linearity, this means that every new individual is exactly as productive as all other individuals

If you get twice as much work done by 10 people as 5, you need to think about what the new people brought to the table, or the old ones don’t.

If the team didn’t have a facilitator, for instance, some team members may not be coordinating, causing issues with finishing tasks.

Because despite having a factorial increase in communication paths, you still got twice as much done? Are you sure?

You have to ask these questions because at worst something bad is happening. At best someone new brought in new techniques that work better than your old ones. You need the answer in either case.

This doesn't make sense to me. Adding more people add communication overhead so you would get sub-linear return. I don't see how you can even expect more than linear return.

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