Thread by @patio11

Inspired by a thread on HN incredulous about engineering headcount at a large software company:

The biggest thing people don’t appreciate about large companies is the basic productive unit isn’t an individual it is an engineering team with about ~8 members.

You need a team, and not an individual, because you need to be able to:

* give vacation
* rotate a pager
* mentor junior engineers
* do professional development
* interface with other teams
* maintain existing systems
* do speculative development
* pay the “organizational tax”

And you need one engineering team for everything you do.

So if you do a lot of things, well, there you go.

Some orgs have smaller scopes for a team. Some have larger. But if your business requires you to interface with mobile carriers in Southeast Asia, well, who owns that?

Incidentally, you can trivially estimate the cost of an engineering team at single digit million dollars.

There exist some services whose value prop is “If you use this, save yourself one engineering team or even an engineering sub org.”

They’re all underpriced.

Another thing not terribly well appreciated is the need for organizational memory, organizational redundancy, and a career path.

Ten engineer startup: “Organizational memory?!? We’ve only been here 6 months; nobody’s forgotten anything.”

BigCo: “We have about five million words written...

TES: “Eek!”

BigCo: “... by one of our senior engineers. And we have several hundred senior engineers.”