Comment by rco8786 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rco8786 | Hacker News Reader

I'm a fan of small teams also - but slowing down as the company scales is unavoidable.

> Startups ship more per person than big companies – everyone knows this. But how do you retain that advantage as you scale?

You can't! Not really. If you could, we would see companies doing it but...we don't (barring some yet undiscovered engineering process).

Everything you ship, by definition, has an ongoing maintenance cost. The more you ship, the higher your maintenance burden. Over years, this grows and grows. Output (as defined by "products shipped") per engineer must go down, because more and more engineers must be dedicated to maintenance work.

Now, we've gotten really good at disguising maintenance work as product work/shipping things. But it's not reality. Even this post makes this mistake by referring to "data warehouse" and "analytics" as "products". But customers don't care about your data warehouse or your job pipeline.

> Right now, for example, we're in the process of scaling support by moving our support engineers out of the customer success team and into a new customer comms team.

This is not product work. This is maintenance, and is a literal example of the type of thing that larger companies have to do just to maintain their existing products and contributes to lower product output per engineer.

Yes!

And it comes down to hubris.

Too many people (in finance, mostly - which drives the rest: entrepreneurs, "big" managers, etc.) in the industry (like to) think that maintenance is bad, because it's not new or growth-capable (which is where they expect to get more, and more, and more).

But maintenance/routine is actually most of the work for everyone, everywhere on this planet. Which is good work.

You can/may outsource, or automate (it's the same actually: getting the same output for a lower cost), it. With the consequences it comes with.

You can/may prefer to be in the 1% of innovation too. But once you innovate (on) something, you've got to maintain it. Someone has to.

The good places where to work are those that admit, and implement (in their structure, in how the manage people and their expectations), that maintenance is most of the work, and that innovation is the small part of it.

It's like in art: most/99% of the time, you practice, you learn. 1% of the time, you get to do/find something great out of it.

Which leads me to the dullness of generative AI: you can't have the 1% if you don't go through the 99% - and you may not understand this if you never tried once to get through those 99%.

> Even this post makes this mistake by referring to "data warehouse" and "analytics" as "products". But customers don't care about your data warehouse or your job pipeline.

Depending on the part of the software industry you are in, customers might care very much about data warehouse or analytics products. Particularly, those products are highly important in the ERP area.

For sure if those happen to be your actual products, but that's not the impression I got from reading this particular post. (Happy to be wrong of course)

Well, analytics and now warehousing are PostHog’s product.

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