Something weird happens to companies when they hit 150 people (2017)
qz.com
qz.com
When you join a large firm, you are joining the team.
I asked a US Marine who he was loyal to, and he said his unit. Not his country or the military.
The same happens at schools and universities: you might know your classmates on your course, but you don't know all the people at a university.
Same goes if you're a sports fan. You might be a supporter, but your experience depends a lot on who you're sat with. Ultras, those kinds of hardcore groups are rarely huge mobs.
My first job out of college was at a ~100 person firm that quickly grew to 200, when I left. The culture I was hoping to join was notably different when I got there (at 120 people) and especially when I left (at ~200). That culture change, and the different expectations, really surprised me at the time.
Yes I think to a great degree because if you join a <100 person company you will interact with the founders regularly, face-to-face, and get to know them. If <20 people, you also get to know them outside work.
Beyond about 100-200 people the CEO is just a face on a webpage that takes credit for what you do (and you're happy with that as long as you're getting paid fairly for it).
Did they say that they were specifically not loyal to country or was it simply omitted in their answer?
"Google cares deeply about making xyz more ABC." We know this is, at best, flowery language. "Google" can't care about xyz any more than an inanimate object can.
Maybe that's an exaggeration, but I do think personifying an organisation to a think that "wants," "loves," or "believes" is disingenuous. That's not the case, necessarily, for a smaller group.
How many managers do you have for this to be a problem at a company of 35?
I think there are actually many such points at which teams/companies change significantly. Going from 2 to 3, or 4 to 5 people can feel like a paradigm shift. Team communication often becomes too complex once the team grows beyond 8. I have seen clique formation starting at 5 people (in a band, but that probably doesn’t matter much), but less so in groups of 4.
We are struggling to get beyond 10 right now. Every time we hire a new person it feels like resetting the entire org chart. The communication thing is 100% on target. At 8 people it felt manageable. Once we got to 10 it was like someone flipped a goddamn switch somewhere. We added a small management layer but this comes at a cost (i.e. we probably need 15+ to justify it fully).
Then the whole thing got delayed, right around the time the new folks ended up, as part of a bunch of projects, exposing the sheer incompetence in some areas. Areas that are vital to get production of the ground. The delay led to a fight between the old and the new culture, and the delay allowed the old to close ranks with founders and clue less career management. As a result, the new culture lost, then the experienced new people left and / or got sidelined. As a result everything got delayed even more, and now VC money is close to run out.
I'm puzzled. Which kind of cultural context does this unfold in? Are these pizzas extraordinarily large? Or is it just a cultural issue that you are supposed to share in any event?
Where I'm at (Northern Europe) ordinary pizzas are about the same size of a LP record (around 30cm, or one foot for the metrically challenged). Unless you specifically order multiple (and/or "family sized") pizzas you are really expected to eat the whole of one pizza by yourself. It's in no way remarkable.
Eating a Chicago deep dish by yourself would be impressive. They style from Giordanos or Lou's
Before you hit around 10 people, you all fit at a comfortable table and can have reasonable meeting where there's a chance for everyone to talk. It's also a reasonable number for one person to manage that size of a team and be able to check in on the others on a regular basis. It's hard not to know the rest of the team - assuming you work in the same place (big assumption these days). It's more likely at this scale that many people have to have broad skillsets in order to work on whatever is necessary.
25-30 is a size where you start to loose track of the names of new people and don't really know some of the team. It's not possible for one person to do a good job managing all the people, so you've probably already started to break things into subgroups and have more mid-level leaders/managers. There are more likely to be specialists at this scale, but it's hard to manage their workload - either too busy or not enough.
As you grow above that size the subdivision and communication issues increase. If you are in an office, you're probably not all in the same room/floor/building. It's likely that there are some people that you almost never see. When someone new is added, you may not meet them for a while. The specialization issues are different. There's more push and pull around what specialist areas to add or drop, but some of the sub teams are more self-sustaining and managing. However when things go poorly, expect re-orgs and layoffs. Loyalties are more to the local team level, not the overall organization. There's more likely some us vs them within the company.
https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/
The ideas started when I was studying the emergent power dynamics of Wikipedia's user community in undergrad, and were also informed by participating in web standards. I believe they are not specific to any one context, but rather emerge inherently any time there are individuals with autonomy who care deeply. Instead of ignoring these dynamics, I think it's important to acknowledge and embrace them with a sense of compassion and openness.
Obviously the dynamic of employees at a company (mostly) differ from a hunter-gatherer tribe or from an online gaming or other community.
I think on balance 150-300 per grade is ideal.
Schools that have less than 150 students in a grade just cannot offer students anything other than the same basic actives everyone has. You won't take calculus because there are not enough students to start a calculus class, and this holds back the smart kids futures. You will play football as we cannot field a team without every student there, it doesn't matter how much you would prefer to play any other sport instead we can (not they won't, they cannot) never start a team.
Schools with more than 300 start to get to the point where they can't let students into popular courses/sports and this breeds have/have-not culture wars.
My numbers above are close, but subject to some debate.
I should add that there were some specialized classes available, like programming, in the evening where people from multiple schools were gathered.
Seems like a good point to split a business unit based on function or something. Do some Conway's Law hacking. If that's not possible, then simply horizontally partition.
> ...they seem to me to be a new individual, not at all like single men. A man in a group isn't himself at all; he's a cell in an organism that isn't like him any more than the cells in your body are like you. People have said, 'mobs are crazy, you can't tell what they'll do.' Why don't people look at mobs not as men, but as mobs? A mob nearly always seems to act reasonably, for a mob.
... when group-man wants to move, he makes a standard. 'God wills that we recapture the Holy-Land'; or he says, 'We fight to make the world safe for democracy' ... But the group doesn't care about the Holy Land, or Democracy ... Maybe the group simply wants to move, to fight, and uses these words simply to reassure the brains of individual men. ... You might be an effect as well as a cause, Mac.
The irony is, Philip Rosedale often talked about the Dunbar number in relationship to how virtual communities were best formed/organized!
It's a very real phenomenon in my experience and I've also used the moment to really gain separation from competitors as well, since the stumbling is predictable at right around this point.
Below 50, you basically have a flat org. Even with nominal mangers, everyone is effectively on the same team. 50-150 you need an actual management layer, but these managers are all on the same team, and are also close to the ICs on their team so they have the full context of the entire business between the management group. 150+ you need to introduce a manager-of-managers layer which means you have increased overhead across the board in addition the other communication and coordination challenges.
> That’s because founder Bill Gore felt that when a unit of workers got big enough, “we decided” became “they decided.”
In 2023, you might write this so that it doesn't sound anything like recent tech layoff memos.
As companies grow there has to be more process and ICs are further and further from senior management.
> the main problem was that the 95% confidence intervals for these estimates were between 2 and 520 people.