[jen729w]

I’m fascinated by the idea that, once a company reaches a certain size – let’s say 100 – then it is, by definition, average. Any claims to be above average may be summarily dismissed.

This exhibits most clearly in large IT integrators. I know, I work for one. The marketing spiel makes me feel sick.

If I were ever to start a company – I probably don’t want the stress – I’d want to keep it small.

It is for this reason that I find Apple fascinating. They have their issues but if there is a company that seems to have somehow escaped this jinx, they are it. (I know, I know, YMMV. Please don’t turn this in to an Apple thread.)

[samwillis]

They way I had it described to me was that the optimal number of direct reports to one person is 7 (hence why military squads tend to be about 8 people). All companies go through growing pains as they reach ~7^n people and have to put in another layer of management. So about 7, 50, 340, 2400…

In reality most companies will have a 2-3 founders running it and so those numbers are more like, 14-20, 100-150, 700-1000.

I have never worked somewhere with larger teams so I may well be wrong, however there is definitely a step in small businesses with two founders at about the 20 people point.

[encrux]

This seems surprisingly reasonable for my personal experience, so I'm gonna use it as a general rule now /s

[ethanbond]

Inquiry like this should be left to the people who experience it, and of course all they have is their personal experience and then opportunities to share their personal experience.

Do we really need some outside authority to tell us what we’re seeing and how to talk about it?

[influx]

The term you are looking for is Span of Control.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Span_of_control

[jpgvm]

Netflix for many years was an outlier because of the stupidly high bar they kept for engineering hires. Obviously that all fell apart a few years ago and have since diluted their talent pool into mediocrity but I still think it's a counter-point for the argument that you can't maintain a high quality team into the ~200 engineers range.

[highwaylights]

I can't speak to whether your assertion is true or not (I've no experience of Netflix or it's hiring), but it kind of makes sense that this would happen if you think of the Netflix journey to date.

They transitioned from a mail order DVD system to online streaming, building that as they went, then moved the lot to the cloud while keeping everything up during it's exponential growth period.

There are a lot of really hard engineering challenges just in that sentence that would need some really good people, but now that they've built out a planetscale video delivery system their needs are a lot different (they just need to keep the lights on and the engine running).

I'm sure some really clever engineering still happens at Netflix but mostly the hard problems appear to be solved at this point, so you don't need incredible resources. Also, it would follow that most of those people would want to seek out new challenges rather than stick around for maintenance over the long term, but I've no idea if this actually happened there.

[jcims]

I'm curious why Zoom doesn't get more shine.

In my opinion they were tested like few other companies in history at the start of the pandemic and seem to have pulled it off. My former employer had 60,000 people with technical roles and we all went to zoom in the summer of 2020 after our existing conferencing solution completely shit the bed. I won't say there were zero issues but the number definitely rounds to zero.

Obviously there are the privacy questions, but that's orthogonal to the engineering challenge of delivering realtime voice/video to millions of people.

[ecshafer]

I think Zoom doesn't get more shine for the same reason Alibaba, Baidu, or ByteDance don't. They are large companies doing complex engineering, but they are Chinese and not western.

[sargun]

I'd say that in systems engineering, alibaba gets a lot of love. Alicloud folks have actually done a lot of impressive stuff with k8s

[throwaway744678]

Not sure I am getting your point... Zoom is a US company.

[hardware2win]

> My former employer had 60,000 people with technical roles and we all went to zoom in the summer of 2020 after our existing conferencing solution completely shit the bed

Do i understand it correctly?

60k ppl left ur job and went to zoom?

[jcims]

I could have stated that more clearly. 60k people started working from home full time and we switched completely away from our existing solution to Zoom as the primary service provider for teleconferencing.

[TheJoeMan]

What’s interesting is in my opinion Netflix engineers made the best UI and best reliability with distributed edge-node storage and all those hard problems.

Disney+ still lags ridiculously, but guess which one has the blockbusters?

[jpgvm]

Yeah I completely get why it happened it's just sad that it did.

Because of how markets work in the US their management come under immense pressure to find other sources of "growth" now that the main streaming business has capped out.

TLDR engineering hiring got a lot less selective in pursuit of accelerating "new growth areas". Once that happens your A class engineers leave and you can't ever rehire at that same level again without majorly taking out the trash.

[hhmc]

> Obviously that all fell apart a few years ago and have since diluted their talent pool into mediocrity

This could well be true, but it seems far from obvious to me. Do you have any evidence? Clearly netflix stock is doing poorly in recent months, but this seems much more of a consequence of content issues rather than engineering talent.

[bsenftner]

Netflix has a strange technical management philosophy: they have zero interest in any technology other than their existing streaming infrastructure and traditional media production tools. I've had conversations with members of their tech management, and their ability to investigate new technology directions (such as a Netflix Game Service, or a Netflix Online University) are absolutely zero. One of their identified sources of success is a narrow focus, and they push that commitment.

[kderbyma]

they need product help badly. I have never seen such a stagnant tech company. its like watching paint dry

[kderbyma]

they hired the wrong engineers. they focused on infrastructure....no product

[jpgvm]

Tell me more about how they didn't manage to create a compelling streaming product that failed to gain any market share.

Oh wait. That isn't what happened.

Is their product now stagnant? Yes. Are they facing market saturation problems and increased competition, withdrawal of content from competitors that were previously partners etc, sure.

The engineers they hired were 100% the right engineers, they made streaming work on an Internet that was much less capable than it is now (over 10 years ago), were the first to successfully use cloud computing properly and laid the foundation for and/or contributed to much the of tech the rest of large distributed systems would be built on.

The fact they blew the transition and haven't successfully branched out doesn't in any way discredit the achievements of the "real" Netflix team that changed media delivery on the Internet forever.

[hardware2win]

>Netflix team that changed media delivery on the Internet forever.

Genuine question

Whats the diff between them and yt?

[jpgvm]

If you are talking exclusively about delivery systems. Bitrate.

At it's peak Netflix accounted for ~35%+ of traffic on the Internet (around 2014-2015 era) alone. Times have obviously changed since then. Not because it had more users than YouTube or more playtime but because it was delivering long-form content in high resolution. Which at the time was a considerable technical challenge, from bandwidth and distribution itself but also to encoding infrastructure.

More broadly Netflix also had a profound impact on the CDN landscape. They made use of all existing CDNs (Akamai, Cloudfront, old stuff I forget) while also building out their own POPs, they paved the way for modern CDNs in many ways. The style of which would eventually be cloned by many players but most importantly Fastly. Fastly would then go on to provide this service to new players like Bytedance to rapidly deploy massive delivery capability with very little ramp-up. They did some less-cool things ofc, they bowed to the HDCP mob and did dumb things like build a Silverlight based client etc. By and large however Netflix has had a positive impact on the industry.

YouTube on the other hand (after acquisition) was largely built with Google tech on Google infra. The only major project to come out of it isn't delivery related is Vitess - a sharding system for MySQL. Its largest impacts on the industry are unfortunately much less savory. Mostly pioneering inventions like pre-roll ads and targeting based on content in which the video is embedded, heinous recommendation algorithms that send people into procrastination spirals etc.

Well that isn't entirely fair, we can thank Youtube for pushing for better encoding standards and tangentially through Chrome making HTML5 video not suck (arguably though, Safari/Webkit was also influential there).

[spookthesunset]

And yet our family spends almost no time with netflix and instead lives on Disney+, HBOMax, YouTube and Paramount+. And paramount+ sucks as a software product. It is by far the buggiest of the bunch but yet it has the content. Netflix doesn't have much compelling content anymore