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by naravara 2636 days ago
>that's because of the lack of trust, and the flow of responsibility and control.

I currently work for a company that has been transitioning from being tiny (I was employee #24) to pretty big (we're close to 60 now). One thing I've learned, much to my disappointment, is that once you get past a certain size it gets harder and harder to recruit people worth trusting with that kind of responsibility. The supply of such people is too limited, and they tend to get poached quickly.

>If you structure a company such that the employees themselves has to be responsible for their output in such a way that higher output leads to more money for them

Oh so all you need to do is fairly and reliably measure "output" in an ungameable way? Easy! /s
1 comments
katbyte 2636 days ago
Just want to point out 60 is really not all that big, 500 is getting big, 1000 is huge.

If your feeling that at 60, imagine what that must feel like..

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naravara 2636 days ago
50-60 is a transition point for small businesses. That's the point at which it literally becomes impossible to be indifferent to process or structure.

Prior to that size companies can kind of get by on luck, skill, or the "heroic efforts" of individual contributors to carry them along. Once you hit 50 FTE that approach starts to fail more and fail harder. This is why tons of small businesses flame out when they hit this threshold.

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bluGill 2636 days ago
500 is just getting into medium size. I'd say you need to approach 10,000 before you can say large. You need tens of millions before I could call you huge (Ie a country, depending on how you define organization might need to be a dictatorship to count for you)

I agree with your point, but I think your scale factors for size are off by orders of magnitude.

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yossi_peti 2636 days ago
> You need tens of millions before I could call you huge

That seems like an absurd standard to me. The three largest employers in the world (by number of employees) are 1. The U.S. Department of Defense, 2. The People's Liberation Army (China), and 3. Walmart. Each of these three largest employers in the world has between 2 and 3 million employees, which is much less than your standard of "tens of millions".

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bluGill 2635 days ago
China is a controlled economy, so you can argue that a large part of their people are employees of the state.
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