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Great read. While I've not worked at a big company in a couple of years, this resonates with many things that I imagined is happening inside large, tech-savvy orgs, reinforced by observations of the industry and anecdotes from insiders. If you read between the lines -- and note, the author himself probably did not intend that subtext, or was careful to avoid implying it -- you will realize that the likely natural equilibrium involves way, way less people. I wrote in more detail in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48040999 -- but the upshot is that in the future teams, or heck entire departments, will be replaced by 1 - 3 very senior ICs that do both strategic and hands-on work. The driving force for that structure is the high coordination costs or large org, which TFA bemoans quite a few times but does not explicitly call out as THE main issue. I mean, if three teams can provide working solutions in record time, your problem is not aligning them, your problem is that you have two teams too many. On the bright side, fewer people also means fewer organizational pathologies like bureaucracy, silos, duplication of work, turf-wars, empire building and politics in general. The downside is well, a jobacalypse, starting with juniors (future talent pipeline problem says what?) and middle-management. This does assume very capable ICs who can do strategic as well as tactical hands-on work. This is where future job seekers want to be. They will be worth their weight in gold. Which will still be wayyyyyy less than the value they provide (or crudely, the salaries of the teams they replace.) They'll do 5x the work but won't get paid 5x as much, of course. what do you think this is, socialism? |