[NotGMan]

>> if the CEO’s direct staff is 60 people, the number of layers you’ve removed in a company is probably something like seven.”

This is a great insight since so much gets lost in the management layer which causes frustration for devs while the CEO doesn't have a clue what's actually going on in the trenches.

[lupire]

But doesn't also much get lost when the manager can't keep up with 60 reports?

Mathematics teaches us that the distance in a tree, from root to leaf, where each node is a linked list, is minimized when the branching factor is e, the base of the natural logarithm. For example, e is the most efficient base for writing integers.

Management isn't quite the same, but branch size is are relevant.

Management isn't

[viraptor]

Have you got a source for e as the optimal branching factor? (On average it feels plausible, but haven't seen a confirmation) But I don't get the idea about writing numbers in base e - by definition integers in base e are the least efficient, because they'd be infinite.

[gravescale]

It's called radix economy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_economy

A non-integral number like e is obviously of limited utility in physical systems because having e adders in your ALU doesn't make much sense.

3 is closer then 2 to e, which also why ternary arithmetic was attempted for a while, but the massive advantage of binary in terms of implementation (it is much easier and far lower power to use transistors to slam a voltage high or low than keep it somewhere in the middle, and easier to arrange gates to have only on and off as inputs) won in the end.