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Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

I believe this describe most of the industry.

Conferences about high performance teams and practices are wet dreams.

If I'm wrong then I want to meet these teams.

I work at a very high performance company that I co-founded. But we are less than 150 people and ~50% have been with us for 10 to 20 years as loyal employees we have brought through a few firms.

I think small, lucrative, focused companies can enjoy work-life balance and strong employee and customer loyalty. You need a niche that is big enough to support a 90th percentile team, but small and esoteric enough to avoid attention of giant firms. It is a delicate balance. I think the German Mittelstand model is similar, except translate this to software.

I work in a "Mittelstand" company and we are definitely operating mostly on chaos.

Well to be honest most companies of any size are operating on chaos. But the person I was replying to "wanted to meet [the high performing] teams" so I gave an example of mine, where I feel things are fairly well-oiled. But this is a unique situation, that is actually the result of 20 years of building. We even raised VC but they have accepted whatever it is they have invested in, which won't be 1000x ROI.

Thanks, there's so many questions coming to mind:

- how did you find your team mates

- how do you plan the work (fully self organized ? xp ? agile ? another method ?)

- how do you resolve human issues (intra or inter teams frictions, loss of motivation)

- do you assess per employee performance or not ? (have you ever run into a situation where someone was faking, or faking too much, but nobody checked ? or is you group tight enough so that any such case will be detected and fixed rapidly)

- do you have allocated time for team performance improvements ? remove friction, adjust processes

- do you allow creative attempts (if someone thinks he could chase a new idea for a day or two)

also, i didn't ask, how do you define high performance ? i have my own definition in a way: ability to understand most parts of your system in a few minutes with high confidence, ability to try new ideas, ability to split work between people for parallelism so that integrating is nearly guaranteed and lastly people who can generate new ideas multiple times per day

I thought I was insane reading all of these chaos comments. I’ve worked at several companies that are VERY well organized. I think that above or below a certain scale chaos is the rule, but somewhere around 100 people can be a smooth running machine.

It seems that the bigger a company is, the higher percentage of dead wood.

yeah it's something one can read regularly, and especially in military or govt settings where the bureaucracy is so heavy it takes a month to add a file.

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