| > As someone who looks at a "growing" startup up as 30-100 people the "bloat" of the company had me beside myself. Its a site where you search/join/pay to have groups meetup. Why do you need 10 different engineering teams with managers, directors, and VP's? > Conversation points like "I only lead the api for payments" and "how did you launch 5 features in 3 months!!!! Makes me wonder how much bloat, inefficiency, and dead weight exist in such companies. I did a contract for $LARGE_MULTINATIONAL_RETAILER a few years ago. We needed to build a new customer registration process for online customers. To be clear, we're talking two web pages and some data (name, other necessary personal information, contact details) inserted into a handful of databases. This data would then be used by all other online services. It took 8 months. I estimated it involved 60 people from at least half a dozen teams. One of my colleagues estimated over 100 people. I... couldn't really cope. I wanted to fire everyone[1], or at least almost everyone, and do the whole job with a small team (one to two pizzas) with some careful systems analysis in a few weeks. At the end of the project, when all key stakeholders were on a call, and we finally ran a test that inserted all the data in the right places and allowed a customer to actually buy something, I nearly came from sheer relief. It is not healthy for a human being to get that excited over such a small victory after such a long period of time and effort expended. Every single project was like that. [1] Actually I wanted to let at least 70% - 80% of the people go in the entire directorate, along with a large swathe of middle and senior management. These weren't bad people, or stupid people, or even inept people - many were very smart, and very competent: just useless within the context of the company's needs. |