Steve Jobs capped many of the teams in Cupertino | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs capped many of the teams in Cupertino

minimalmac.com

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Teams that are bigger than necessary to get their job done create huge problems in large corporations. People without enough to do aren't just wasting money and other resources, they also create politics. It's difficult to figure out the optimal size of a team, but I've seen greater productivity out of teams that are a bit too small than those that are a bit too big.

The problem is you get managers who are "head count" hungry and want as many people reporting to them as can fit in the building. It becomes a matter of politics. Having a limit placed from the top down is a good thing. More large corps should do this.

Even better, michaelochurch has talked about open allocation before.

Open allocation is great if your project lead can accurately and honestly define resource needs.

Having worked in many a megacorp, that would seem to be an incredibly rare scenario. Most teams can't even track actual resource usage, let alone accurately project the data.

I remember reading that Richard Branson does much the same. When a team gets above 20 people, he splits the team up. Similar reasons - so that the culture kept within a team was better because everyone knew each other well.

I recall reading that back in the good old days at HP, they would split a group into two groups once it grew to over 100 people.

This discussion of Dunbar's number gives some useful background:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

When I was at KPMG, back in the early 90s, all the branches I visited had a similar structure - units of about 20 to 40 people, with an operational manager (OM, usually with senior managers as his/her title) who was not a partner. Each OM would report to at least one partner, but sometimes several OMs would report to one partner, or there would be a department with several units and several partners, where decisions would be made through a board of partners and OMs.

I never heard that this was a uniform policy for KPMG, but as far as I saw, it was how they organised audit, tax, and consulting units, and they used it for offices as small as 40 staff and offices as big as 700 staff. KPMG management back then were proud of how there was workplace harmony in the units, efficient communication between management and partners, and their federal structure (i.e., the top partner is not a dictator).

Groups of up to 40 staff would be around a third or a quarter of the optimal group size that Robin Dunbar posited for humans. Cf. http://blog.sitefox.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Hill_Dunb... - it makes sense that the size of work groups in a large company should be below the Dunbar number, since their colleagues should not only be the people in their work group, but they should try to maintain a network throughout the company.

It just makes a lot of sense. Interaction dynamics change at various sizes.

The conclusion seems at odds with the anecdote. What if my reason for switching to a new "minimalist" text editor was to escape the inefficiency of a familiar but bloated IDE with features I don't need?

I would have thought the reason behind this was more along the lines of http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

>You know, this works for software and hardware too. The less features or parts, the more “knowable” it is to you.

I have definitely felt that each of the Microsoft Office Suite of products was "unknowable" in its full extent. Now that being said, even though I personally prefer a text editor over something like Word, the tools are undoubtly useful and powerful for many casual users. Of course, nothing is worse than having to edit someone's poorly formatted, inconsistent .docx file...

'Two-pizza teams'. If you can't feet the whole team with 2 pizzas, it's too big.

An interesting anecdote, but from the headline, I expected a completely different story:

That Steve had "capped" them in the sense of "busted some caps into their [behinds]."

Why 100? Why not 20?

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