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0 pointsDove3y ago0 comments

I suppose that is true, if you reason narrowly.

There is another force in play: the degree to which support makes the individual more powerful. I am much closer to my full potential as a problem solver when surrounded by effective management/facilities/IT/legal/differently-specialized-peers/enough-people-to-work-on-truly-large-systems than when I go it alone. Having spent significant time both as a freelancer and in mind bogglingly huge corporations, the corp lifestyle has its drawbacks for sure -- but I myself find the benefits of support and large problems to dramatically outweigh the drawbacks of politics and lack of freedom. Your mileage may vary, of course. Shoot, my mileage has varied over the course of a career. Still, the intuition seems solid: you aren't going to be solving Google-datacenter or Amazon-logistics levels of problems with your personal startup calendar app. At least, not usually, not for a while.

If there is a minimum size market which can maximize the impact of a good developer, I suspect there might be a minimum size company, too.

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syntheweave3y ago

I believe the optimal company size is related to the recency of disruptive technology. At the outset of a novel, disruptive process the scrappy startup jumps ahead: the actual advantage comes from not needing to take the same approach and use the same kind of team structure because they're going to leverage the new process. They have to build everything anew, but so does everyone else, so moving on the problem with political solutions in mind can waste most of your resources. Speed, experimentation and risk-taking is favored. This phase can launch a lot of careers, and software has seen it repeatedly, though not as much recently. Startups within the SV model spent most of the past decade mostly working on marketing-heavy concepts with a dash of tech, and I think this is turning just now based on recent hiring threads.

When dealing with a mature process the support team is fleshed out and specialized; high performers have been filtered through the events of previous market cycles, and are now optimized into upholding a political role within the org. To a nominal degree everything the mature org does matters more because it's bigger in every respect, but the opportunities presented to ICs deal increasingly with maintaining infrastructure already being used, rather than leveraging infrastructure towards a novel experiment. Someone has to do both, of course, or else you don't get advancements. But you are going to feel more powerful within the big org, and you usually get compensated better.

raverbashing3y ago

Exactly this

Small teams with a big support behind are optimal (I think)

Two guys in a garage sounds exciting but in reality it's kinda inefficient (less so with all the SaaS stuff today, but still)

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