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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

> One person can do the work of 3 and regularly does in startups.

Startup architecture and a 500+ engineer org's architecture are fundamentally different. The job titles are the same, but wont reflect the actual work.

Of course that's always been the case, and applies to the other jobs as well. What a "head of marketing" does at a 5 person startup has nothing to do with what the same titled person does at Amazon or Coca Cola.

I've also seen many orgs basically retitling their infra teams members as "devops" and call it a day. Communication between devs from different part of the stack has become easier, and there will be more "bridge" roles in each teams with an experienced dev also making sure it all works well, but I don't see any company that cared about their stack and performance fire half of their engineers because of a new fancy trend in the operation community.

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> Startup architecture and a 500+ engineer org's architecture are fundamentally different

Certainly. The startup architecture is often better. I don’t know what exactly leads to those overcomplicated enterprise things, but I suspect its a lack of limitations.

Large org architecture is, most importantly, just much larger. The bank I worked in had 6000 _systems_. A lot of that was redundancy due to a lot of mergers and acquisitions that didn't get cleaned up (because it was really hard to do). Compare that to your typical SaaS startup, which typically has at most a couple systems.

Right. You can't run a 100 or even 1,000 person organization the same way you run a 25,000 person organization and many of the people roles are different. The 25,000 person organization can do more but it needs a lot more process to function. For example, the person just doing what they see as needing to be done in the small organization becomes a random loose cannon in the large one.

Someone mentioned DevSecOps upthread. The breaking down of organizational barriers really was more of a smaller company sort of thing. Platform Engineering and SREs are a better model of how this has evolved at scale.

There’s that, sure. But that’s also because everyone is way too happy to add another new system to the pile. Large enterprises generally have only so many business functions. I can get to about 100 necessary systems before feeling like they’re redundant.

And all these people have been given fodder by the microservices revolution.

> Large enterprises generally have only so many business functions.

Well, no, the difference in quantity of business functions can be enormous due to duplication. A small business will have an accounting business function, but a large business may have 57 separate accounting business functions due to having operations in different countries, having subsidiaries and mergers&acquisitions (possible multiple concurrently ongoing ones) where you will merge accountings (multiple!) from the new acquisition into yours, but it has not yet happened.

Somebody said: "God was able to create the world in 6 days because he didn't have an installed base."

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