That’s not at all my experience of 25 years in Tech both in that industry (Products, Services and even Startups) and others (mainly Finance).
More people (or more time - i.e. overworking) most definitelly do not mean more results and in some case can even mean less results.
If seen departments 3x as large producing less than half the results, and way more so when talking about small teams (in my area 4 senior devs familiar with each other can outproduce a whole department of mid/junior-level devs).
Curiously Tech Startups were especially inneficient, probably because they tended to hire young and enthusiastic people (“With a tendency to run really hard whilst not knowing were they’re trying to get to”) and don’t really have much in the way of software development processes whilst well established (but comparativelly boring) companies hired the kind of people in their 30s or more with families who want a good steady salary, and had well established team structures.
But don’t take my word for it, just read books like “The Mythical Man Hour”.
I think you misunderstood me. My point was if your company/project was already running incredibly inefficiently, cutting more people would not make the remaining people more efficient somehow out of fear, because what caused the inefficiency is still there, you just have more things for each of them to do now.
The way to increase efficiency is to figure out what part of the whole process is causing waste and aim to minimize that, but that is HARD because it requires understanding your process, which is why they just do the lazy thing and fire a bunch of people to appease the almighty shareholders, so that they can say they did something.
I think we’re thinking along the same lines on this.
What I’ve observed is that when there genuinelly is an excess of manpower, it’s always down to management problems, be it a culture of “empire building” (managing more people makes a manager’s CV look better and is a justification for higher pay plus some people just want to boss others) or trying to solve efficiency problems by throwing more “resources” at it (the whole mythical idea that more man-hours = more results) rather than understanding the process and improving it.
The very same management flaws that produce genuine situations of excess of manpower will also create all manner of somewhat related problems, such as environments of sistematic overwork and cutting down on personnel to given an appearence of “efficiency improvement”. I would even say that these are all just different facets of the same way of doing things, were different market competition situations and/or the ups and downs of a company’s life-cycle make each a different facet more likely.
That’s not at all my experience of 25 years in Tech both in that industry (Products, Services and even Startups) and others (mainly Finance).
More people (or more time - i.e. overworking) most definitelly do not mean more results and in some case can even mean less results.
If seen departments 3x as large producing less than half the results, and way more so when talking about small teams (in my area 4 senior devs familiar with each other can outproduce a whole department of mid/junior-level devs).
Curiously Tech Startups were especially inneficient, probably because they tended to hire young and enthusiastic people (“With a tendency to run really hard whilst not knowing were they’re trying to get to”) and don’t really have much in the way of software development processes whilst well established (but comparativelly boring) companies hired the kind of people in their 30s or more with families who want a good steady salary, and had well established team structures.
But don’t take my word for it, just read books like “The Mythical Man Hour”.
I think you misunderstood me. My point was if your company/project was already running incredibly inefficiently, cutting more people would not make the remaining people more efficient somehow out of fear, because what caused the inefficiency is still there, you just have more things for each of them to do now.
The way to increase efficiency is to figure out what part of the whole process is causing waste and aim to minimize that, but that is HARD because it requires understanding your process, which is why they just do the lazy thing and fire a bunch of people to appease the almighty shareholders, so that they can say they did something.
I think we’re thinking along the same lines on this.
What I’ve observed is that when there genuinelly is an excess of manpower, it’s always down to management problems, be it a culture of “empire building” (managing more people makes a manager’s CV look better and is a justification for higher pay plus some people just want to boss others) or trying to solve efficiency problems by throwing more “resources” at it (the whole mythical idea that more man-hours = more results) rather than understanding the process and improving it.
The very same management flaws that produce genuine situations of excess of manpower will also create all manner of somewhat related problems, such as environments of sistematic overwork and cutting down on personnel to given an appearence of “efficiency improvement”. I would even say that these are all just different facets of the same way of doing things, were different market competition situations and/or the ups and downs of a company’s life-cycle make each a different facet more likely.
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