[fullsend]

I started out firmly against large companies. My ideal team is 10-20 engineers, in person, hyper focused and all on the same page with mutual respect. Minimal or no product manager types.

But I’m also sick of hearing how these teams can “ship” so fast. Yeah you can ship, you have no customers. No users, no SLAs, no employees. Good work, you just did whatever you wanted and then typed “git push” to a repo you control, with standards you control, and a build process you control. Wow those stodgy big co’s could learn something from you!

This is a similar convo to “why use Kubernetes”. Do you have one binary and one database with one password? Go nuts with your single VPS and bash scripts and keep telling yourself that everyone is over complicating it. But are you scaling? You’ll probably need some orchestration. You’ll probably need some managers, a ticket system, on-call, standard build tools. Documentation.

Scaling to billions with a team of 20 is a fantasy achieved only by the select few. As always it is a fine line companies should tread lightly. Don’t rush to hire, but don’t be afraid of it either. Focus on scaling intentionally and carefully.

[llm_trw]

>My ideal team is 10-20 engineers

This is _not_ a small team. This is the size of a team that can serve the world, see whatsapp. A small team is >5 engineers working on a well defined business task, like writing Unix.

[icedchai]

A small team is more like 3 to 6 people, focused on building. Your manager is also an IC and probably a cofounder of the company. 10-20 is in the range where you need some more coordination and processes.