Why everything breaks at 150 people | Hacker News Reader

Why everything breaks at 150 people

falconer.com

14 pointsiamgioh6 comments

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Dunbar's number is another manifestation of Coase's ceiling. Coase's insight is more general, as it applies not only to every other kind of organizational dynamic, but also to, e.g., the scaling of friction in mechanical systems.

Interesting point. Just read about Coase's theorem of the firm. Isn't it slightly narrower than the ceiling metaphor? a firm expands "until the costs of organizing an extra transaction within the firm become equal to the costs of carrying out the same transaction by means of an exchange on the open market." That's a price related argument. The Dunbar limit doesn't.

This is where I would push, if Dunbar's number is a manifestation of the same thing, shouldn't it move when the price moves? Coase's ceiling has moved over time, while Dunbar's limit isn't. What's happening there?

The intersection in this case comes from source of truth information getting out of date with moving code. You can't tell whether its wrong until its been acted upon. So people stop trusting the docs, which is where Dunbar's number comes up again

Cost != price. Organizational friction is a cost; in fact it is the dominant hidden cost. Organizations that grow past Coase's ceiling are paralyzed by internal friction. They become unable to execute any mission: all they can do is to simply be an organization, with all the overfamiliar toxic manifestations. Any kind of organization: commercial, political, academic. Boiled down, the insight is that friction increases faster than the number of moving parts.

https://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html

codebase tells you what the system currently does but not WHY it was built that way, a well maintained document adds more value in such cases. how you maintain such docs that go stale with changing business decisions?

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