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by prostoalex
4291 days ago
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> because working for a startup as an employee, even a fairly early employee, really isn't all that different from working for a larger company How so? Typically with a large company an engineer is exposed to a variety of stakeholders, such as other engineers, designers, DBAs, product managers, project managers, program managers, engineering managers with more or less clearly defined roles. At a startup a bunch of those roles are usually conflated, and without prior experience during the growth phase it's pretty hard to make a statement like "we need to hire a project manager, we're spending too much time on ad hoc project management" or "it's time to add a product manager into the team, product is becoming too big to be managed via email/chat". Without exposure to such clarity of roles, most of the teams just go with the flow, passively-aggressively protesting the amount of busywork that's suddenly their responsibility. |
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The difference was that most of these senior people did quite a bit of grunt work that in a larger organization would have been delegated. The VP did a lot of program manager work and the leads did a lot of design and development, since they only had a couple of subordinates each.
But because the roles and hierarchies were established, it was usually clear whose responsibility it was to make any particular decision. We had on paper a formal organization suitable for a much larger team. We could have telescoped out to three times the number of engineers without adding any more senior people; the leads and VP would just have spent more time on leadership duties and less on direct implementation. I suspect the presence of the formal hierarchy was why the organization felt very mature.
Are things different in other companies of the same size?