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by 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..

2 comments

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.

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.

> 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".

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