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Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely ... for large organisations the key is scale. When it comes to staff in strategic roles (engineering, software, etc etc) that build capability, there's a point where the challenge of growing past a certain scale completely depends on substituting individual action (aka productivity) with organisational ability to deliver results using any number of employees, where that number doesn't really matter any more. And that depends far more on the things you mention - clarity, alignment, procedural coherence, etc than getting even 2x more from the individuals involved.

It's funny because software engineers will be the first to tell you that "premature optimisation is the root of all evil" and other similar mantras but then be perplexed that their own individual productivity isn't the first item on their manager's agenda. The manager is probably busy optimising something else.

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As usual, tech bros assume they know how to do everyone elses job better than they do. And if they aren't doing it the way the tech bro thinks it should work, it's because they are incompetent, not that there is some other factor not considered.

I would argue that your innovation center should be staffed primarily focusing on productivity rather than scale. You can always add scale as needed but you can’t add productivity once you’re at scale

There are productivity decisions at the micro-level that actively hurt scaling. The easy business example here is the choice to manage data in Excel as opposed to a formal database. (Very common in financial orgs). Excel gives the team today much more flexibility, at the trade-off of risk (anyone can edit numbers) and scaling (other teams probably can't find your excel file).

> There are productivity decisions at the micro-level that actively hurt scaling

Probably the most obvious one that HN readers will be familiar with is the 10x developer who trail blazes out amazing software but even if they do document it well, it generates an unsustainable technical foundation because it can't be supported after they move on (whether internally or externally). In a startup, this person is invaluable. In a large organisation you may even screen them out at interview stage in certain contexts.

Maybe? Definitely not always.

My team is the heart of my company's innovation center and we've very intentionally sacrificed a lot of productivity for alignment and it's been really good for the business. It's an internal platform with probably another ~20 eng years of work left, turns out the bits of work our team thought would be most impactful weren't. By focusing on alignment we've been able to sequence the work so that more of company gets onboard early and the company as a whole delivers more value, faster, with less long term debt.

How would you define productivity and scale here? Because I would say the exact opposite: you can always add productivity by employing more people to do the same job, but to really grow you need to innovate so that the processes/tools you use become productivity multipliers. So in my mind, the innovation center is where the scaling happens, and operations departments is where linear increases in productivity happen.

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