> Somewhere around 100 people, the ground shifts underneath you, as you realize you don’t know everyone anymore. You just can't. There aren't enough hours in the day, and honestly, there aren't enough slots in your brain
This is definitely a rare exception, but at my first job, my boss's boss's boss (basically the #2 in the engineering organization, although probably only like 2/3 of it was under his purview) somehow seemed to have an unfathomable ability for knowing not only everyone under him the org tree, but details about what they were working on. I think it must have been at least 150, maybe even 200 people, and as far as I could tell he could recall every single person's name, project, and the general status of their work without needing anyone to remind him before talking with them. Maybe he did just really studiously review notes or something before any meeting or even chance of an ad hoc conversation in the halls, but I never really saw him typing at meetings or writing stuff down to keep track of later, so at the very least he'd need to have been able to retain a lot of information long enough to accurately record it later. Witnessing this firsthand for a few years was easily one of the most impressive mental feats I've ever observed.
Did having such a person in charge make a qualitative difference in the atmosphere of how work proceeded among people there?
If so, do you think it would have played out similarly if the organization had had an equally effective "glue person" who wasn't in charge (therefore didn't have any authority to delegate or divide most tasks) and was required to manage upward [sic] to coordinate things for people?
I'm not sure, mostly because it's hard for me to feel confident in figuring out what to attribute to that versus other facets of how he did things. Overall, I have an extremely positive view of how he ran things, but I also personally found him great at a lot of the other things that go into a technical leadership position (making good decisions about what to prioritize, having a consistent vision of what our long-term goals were, not falling into the trap of micro-management, having enough technical skill to be able to help out with the higher-level issues while still respecting the areas where others were more knowledgeable, going out of his way to try to address issues that people raised with the idea that retaining talent long-term was hugely important, etc.), so I honestly don't know how much things would have been different if he didn't also have this level of retention of details. It was impressive still though, not in small part because I don't have any trouble imagining someone in his position just genuinely not caring enough to do it even if they were capable.
Maybe the genuineness that it seemed to come from really is what made the difference in the long run; I obviously don't know how everyone else felt about it, but in other jobs I haven't found it particularly difficult to notice when the general perception of higher-level managers is a lot more positive or negative than my own, so my instinct is that most people probably also liked him, and I do think that makes some amount of difference. Having a "glue" person who is more detail-oriented is probably fine if the reason the actual authority figure doesn't retain the details is just not having that particular skill, but if it's because they genuinely think that the people beneath them in the org chart are just resources they can use to solve problems rather than actual people who will work better in the long term if treated well, then no, I don't think it would be as effective.
> I have an idea for a quirky event experimenting with the "minimum viable feeling of community", but need to explain some context first. Bear with me...
> [...]
> So here's the event idea: what if someone ran an event where the 2nd rule was "NO INTRODUCTIONS", but only because the 1st rule was "you must arrive having fully memorized ONLY everyone's name and face". Beyond the strange entry requirement, what would such an event feel like?
> And what strange sorts of intimacy might be created by this minimal scaffold of "knowing everyone"... & being in community together? I suspect it might feel like a warm event full of friends, but where everyone had mysteriously forgotten everything they knew about one another :)
I recall in the first lecture of some Comp Sci class back at uni, our lecturer had learnt what felt like every student's name and face from their digital profile, some 100 people. Whenever a random student raised their hand to participate he would say say "yes, <first name>". I'm still to this day in awe of that.
My last CTO was hired after me, the org was hyperscaling.
When i was interviewed I was told that the company is banking on JS and that's what we were doing on both ends [1]
When CTO was hired he made a walk through the office, greeting every team, he stopped at our cubicle and asked what we were doing - I told him basics - and he said "you should be doing that in Java".
Few weeks later he had a townhall presentation. He came to a room full of people, plug in his computer and the screen started playing a pornhub flix.
Is this that impressive? In my high-school there were roughly 200 people in the year group and I'm pretty sure most of them could list off practically everyones names and something about them?
I don't think that's equivalent. If you were responsible for trying to make sure each of those students were getting good grades, keeping track of each of their GPAs, and getting involved proactively whenever signs that someone's grades might be slipping, that might be comparable. There's a difference between "knowing something general about each person" and being able to keep track of the same general detail about all of them and not ever getting mixed up. If anything, I'd imagine that the facts known about each person were more likely to be things that stood out compared to the others rather than 200 difference instances of the same detail.
I responded to a similar question in more detail from a sibling comment, so I won't repeat it all here, but to briefly summarize: yes, I think he was a great leader, but it's hard for me to tell whether it had much to do with that capability specifically. I certainly don't think it's a requirement for a great leader, but I also think it probably helped at least a little, even if it just ended up being a minor convenience for him and one of many small signals that helped convey that he genuinely cared about trying to do his job well.
I dont think the solution to not knowing people in your company is to create bureaucracy. Ie - only hanging with 10 executives and a focus group. Get out there and talk to people for a few minutes - at the office or wherever.
Ultimately, it is. The post didn't touch on this, but it's exactly why the world looks like it does - it is, and has always been, recursively subdivided. It's why we have districts and towns and counties and states and countries. Hierarchical governance is a result of trying to cooperate in groups larger than the limit of how many direct relationships our brains can support.
Maybe, but a 200 person company isn’t really that big. The CEO should probably get over themselves if they think they couldnt possibly know everyone at least a little bit.
I think, putting what you're saying another way, just because your capacity might be limited to hearing from N people, that doesn't mean it has to be the same N people all the time. It should include a sampling across everyone so you have a lower chance of systematically missing entire points of view.
Teacher here. Best Principal I had would gatecrash your class once a year, then have a chat giving feedback. Kind of stressful (it could happen with little warning) but whatever.
They knew everyone in the school (ebery teacher and about 500+ student names), and what happened in every class. It took time and talent to do it, but it made them a lot less insulated.
Claiming you can't know 100-200 people - your high school teacher wrote 100 reports. Now obviously they aren't 100% on the ball, but they have some idea (I hope).
There's an old story about how Bill Gates once took a call in tech support. A far larger organisation, and he still was willing to dive deep and see what was going on at the least glamorous part of the coalface.
There's a difference between trying to micromanage everything, and micromanaging enough that you're not out of touch.
Feedback is a two way street. It both let's you know what is happening, and let's the people below know that you actually care. Even if you can't (and arguably shouldn't) be everywhere at once, it has its place.
Now yes, it's drive by management and isn't the main tool that a manager should use, but being overly scared that your trusted expert juniors will be destroyed by a senior checking up on them is maybe a bit silly, and if a senior manager is such a tool that they do cause havoc just by looking over someone's shoulder and giving them a bit of feedback you're already in trouble.
Inulation isn't the answer IMO, just accepting that yes you don't need to know everyone and everything to the same level as if it was a small team.
Our CEO does this. She talks to a lot of people. Once you start talking business, she clearly doesn't care about your opinion, unless you're praising something. If it's remotely critical or a suggestion to change something, you can see in her eyes she's not even processing the words anymore.
I rather have her not talking to me, because it's much worse knowing she fakes her openness, than actually just not showing up.
Sounds like some meta-feedback that should be delivered to her. Of course, this kind of person has lots of ways to deflect, so they have to actually genuinely believe in open feedback as a value, and be willing to understand how they are falling short of living up to that value.
In the worst case, they only want to present as open to feedback, while they are using that feedback to build the list of detractors who will be laid off, not promoted, etc. And this kind of personal feedback can really trigger this sort of person.
So I get confused when I read things like "feedback doesn't scale".
Because what am I, if not a self-organizing collective of a trillion cells.
That seems like feedback which scales right there.
This seems like a concrete example of why this logic is flawed.
To me I believe it more useful to start with the premise of:
I'm already communicating and leading trillions, how do I actually do that?
A common issue is that we hold thoughts, logic and language as a type of universal gold standard, while ignoring that most of our communication isn't even verbal to begin with.
It's context, observation, pattern recognition, a self-serving goal which aligns with the collective, because we're all wanting the same things.
What feels good, what's expansive, what's beautiful etc. These are the reward functions for healthy communication in the human body, the more that we align and work with these, the better the results.
> Because what am I, if not a self-organizing collective of a trillion cells. That seems like feedback which scales right there.
You're not, not in this sense. There is no body-wide feedback at all at the cellular level, any single cell is disposable and nothing will notice if it dies. Any meaningful feedback exists between and within functional units of the body.
There is, however, the other, original form of feedback that allows the body to exist - the one that allows you to not have this commonly understood "feedback" in the first place. That is, feedback loops, the control theory concept of systems that self-stabilize or self-amplify. This, not some top-level control, is what's keeping the body together.
The body is a perfect example of a naturally hierarchical system. Society is another. That's what scales.
> So I get confused when I read things like "feedback doesn't scale". Because what am I, if not a self-organizing collective of a trillion cells.
Well, yeah, that feedback scales perfectly because your cells don't have free will.
I think there are plenty of real-world examples of large-scale projects where feedback scaled well, for similar reasons... though I doubt we want to use those as a guide.
Most people who live in a city want the city to function well, and actively do their tiny little bit to see this happen. This doesn't stop them from flipping each other off on the freeway.
More broadly I think you're missing the point of the article. A single person can command a military of millions, but that single person can't ensure that everyone in that military have all of their needs met, personal emergencies dealt with, or just plain care enough to not half-ass it. Much less hear and respond to everyone's ideas on what would make things better, or what's making things worse.
Our individual cells have very simple needs in order to keep our larger structure functioning, and even then sometimes things go catastrophically wrong.
The biggest (engineering) team I've built and led was 150 people, so I cannot speak for 200. I don't feel that the solution of keeping the understanding of what is happening was about a formal structure like an "employee steering committee".
Rather than trusting the same principles used for scaling the doing side of the business. Things like empowering people to make decisions [1] or being clear about what/how/why you make certain types of decisions [2]. Working on staying aligned with your closest team, which then spent energy on staying aligned with their teams, etc. Sample randomly from the whole org, but mostly at your pace.
The biggest mistake I've made was that I've pulled myself (for legitimate reasons, it seemed) from having a true conversation with every single hire before they've gotten an offer, when we were around 70. 30 minutes is typically enough, but I feel you need a singular person as a gatekeeper for the final values-fit check. Partially thinking that 70 is already good enough, but later I've come across people talking about, like, 500 people before pulling out [3] :)
> Feedback doesn't scale because relationships don’t scale.
I would not say it this way; it is too simplistic. In fact, I generally caution against the dominant metaphor here of comparing feedback to scaling. It falls apart quickly.
Here’s a counter point. In many scenarios and settings, relationships provide transitive benefits. For example, if a leader builds trusted relationships with other leaders, a significant amount of trust can flow through that relationship.
To build a better understanding, I suggest building diverse models. Try to answer the question: What kind of qualities do relationships confer and why?
There’s also a generational aspect here. I started my career in the 2000 tech boom and bust. I’ve seen a lot of up-and-down cycles in the industry. I’ve seen lots of management styles and organizational cultures. People that had formative years during peak social media and/or COVID often have a different kind of socialization and this affects their default expectations. I won’t attach normative judgments without research, but there are significant differences.
When I think of the most impressive collaborations I’ve participated in with amazing results, relatively few of them involve tech organizations.
Building a scalable culture over various company sizes feels hard in the sense that generalizing prescriptive advice is tricky. A two person start up is cake because you only have to manage one internal relationship (a pair). People know great culture when they see it, but that is nothing like growing it.
Though I agree with the larger point, there is a critical way to overcome that. The second line of leadership must own the culture at their team's level. This only works if you have direct access to the larger group. An open-door policy where anyone can schedule time with you is essential.
You might not understand their struggle, but you can hear and route it to the right people. Sometimes the best way to show empathy is simply to listen.
> An open-door policy where anyone can schedule time with you is essential.
In my experience, open door policies are necessary but not sufficient. If the policy is to wait for feedback to walk through your door you will only hear from the set of people motivated, willing, and trusting enough to do that.
You have to go out and ask everyone one by one the appropriate questions and also be willing to listen. I’ve been in some companies where feedback was requested but then the immediate reaction was to argue and deny any feedback given, which is a fast path to ensure people stop providing feedback.
Agreed. Setting up structures for people to provide regular feedback is a must -- I believe this goes without saying. The only downside is that this cannot be done 1:1 with each person. Hence, enabling even the motivated few is a good trade-off. But sure, necessary but not sufficient.
At the same time, accepting and acting on feedback is a skill in its own right.
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This is definitely a rare exception, but at my first job, my boss's boss's boss (basically the #2 in the engineering organization, although probably only like 2/3 of it was under his purview) somehow seemed to have an unfathomable ability for knowing not only everyone under him the org tree, but details about what they were working on. I think it must have been at least 150, maybe even 200 people, and as far as I could tell he could recall every single person's name, project, and the general status of their work without needing anyone to remind him before talking with them. Maybe he did just really studiously review notes or something before any meeting or even chance of an ad hoc conversation in the halls, but I never really saw him typing at meetings or writing stuff down to keep track of later, so at the very least he'd need to have been able to retain a lot of information long enough to accurately record it later. Witnessing this firsthand for a few years was easily one of the most impressive mental feats I've ever observed.
If so, do you think it would have played out similarly if the organization had had an equally effective "glue person" who wasn't in charge (therefore didn't have any authority to delegate or divide most tasks) and was required to manage upward [sic] to coordinate things for people?
Maybe the genuineness that it seemed to come from really is what made the difference in the long run; I obviously don't know how everyone else felt about it, but in other jobs I haven't found it particularly difficult to notice when the general perception of higher-level managers is a lot more positive or negative than my own, so my instinct is that most people probably also liked him, and I do think that makes some amount of difference. Having a "glue" person who is more detail-oriented is probably fine if the reason the actual authority figure doesn't retain the details is just not having that particular skill, but if it's because they genuinely think that the people beneath them in the org chart are just resources they can use to solve problems rather than actual people who will work better in the long term if treated well, then no, I don't think it would be as effective.
I also like toying with variants of where "essential elements" can live, sometimes in odd places :)
https://x.com/patcon_/status/1963648801962369358
> I have an idea for a quirky event experimenting with the "minimum viable feeling of community", but need to explain some context first. Bear with me...
> [...]
> So here's the event idea: what if someone ran an event where the 2nd rule was "NO INTRODUCTIONS", but only because the 1st rule was "you must arrive having fully memorized ONLY everyone's name and face". Beyond the strange entry requirement, what would such an event feel like?
> And what strange sorts of intimacy might be created by this minimal scaffold of "knowing everyone"... & being in community together? I suspect it might feel like a warm event full of friends, but where everyone had mysteriously forgotten everything they knew about one another :)
My last CTO was hired after me, the org was hyperscaling. When i was interviewed I was told that the company is banking on JS and that's what we were doing on both ends [1]
When CTO was hired he made a walk through the office, greeting every team, he stopped at our cubicle and asked what we were doing - I told him basics - and he said "you should be doing that in Java".
Few weeks later he had a townhall presentation. He came to a room full of people, plug in his computer and the screen started playing a pornhub flix.
He didn't got fired. I was.
They knew everyone in the school (ebery teacher and about 500+ student names), and what happened in every class. It took time and talent to do it, but it made them a lot less insulated.
Claiming you can't know 100-200 people - your high school teacher wrote 100 reports. Now obviously they aren't 100% on the ball, but they have some idea (I hope).
There's an old story about how Bill Gates once took a call in tech support. A far larger organisation, and he still was willing to dive deep and see what was going on at the least glamorous part of the coalface.
There's a difference between trying to micromanage everything, and micromanaging enough that you're not out of touch.
Feedback is a two way street. It both let's you know what is happening, and let's the people below know that you actually care. Even if you can't (and arguably shouldn't) be everywhere at once, it has its place.
Now yes, it's drive by management and isn't the main tool that a manager should use, but being overly scared that your trusted expert juniors will be destroyed by a senior checking up on them is maybe a bit silly, and if a senior manager is such a tool that they do cause havoc just by looking over someone's shoulder and giving them a bit of feedback you're already in trouble.
Inulation isn't the answer IMO, just accepting that yes you don't need to know everyone and everything to the same level as if it was a small team.
I rather have her not talking to me, because it's much worse knowing she fakes her openness, than actually just not showing up.
In the worst case, they only want to present as open to feedback, while they are using that feedback to build the list of detractors who will be laid off, not promoted, etc. And this kind of personal feedback can really trigger this sort of person.
This seems like a concrete example of why this logic is flawed.
To me I believe it more useful to start with the premise of: I'm already communicating and leading trillions, how do I actually do that?
A common issue is that we hold thoughts, logic and language as a type of universal gold standard, while ignoring that most of our communication isn't even verbal to begin with. It's context, observation, pattern recognition, a self-serving goal which aligns with the collective, because we're all wanting the same things. What feels good, what's expansive, what's beautiful etc. These are the reward functions for healthy communication in the human body, the more that we align and work with these, the better the results.
You're not, not in this sense. There is no body-wide feedback at all at the cellular level, any single cell is disposable and nothing will notice if it dies. Any meaningful feedback exists between and within functional units of the body.
There is, however, the other, original form of feedback that allows the body to exist - the one that allows you to not have this commonly understood "feedback" in the first place. That is, feedback loops, the control theory concept of systems that self-stabilize or self-amplify. This, not some top-level control, is what's keeping the body together.
The body is a perfect example of a naturally hierarchical system. Society is another. That's what scales.
Well, yeah, that feedback scales perfectly because your cells don't have free will.
I think there are plenty of real-world examples of large-scale projects where feedback scaled well, for similar reasons... though I doubt we want to use those as a guide.
They are still independent cells. If they stop cooperating with the rest of the body, they become literally cancer.
Most people who live in a city want the city to function well, and actively do their tiny little bit to see this happen. This doesn't stop them from flipping each other off on the freeway.
More broadly I think you're missing the point of the article. A single person can command a military of millions, but that single person can't ensure that everyone in that military have all of their needs met, personal emergencies dealt with, or just plain care enough to not half-ass it. Much less hear and respond to everyone's ideas on what would make things better, or what's making things worse.
Our individual cells have very simple needs in order to keep our larger structure functioning, and even then sometimes things go catastrophically wrong.
Deleted Comment
Rather than trusting the same principles used for scaling the doing side of the business. Things like empowering people to make decisions [1] or being clear about what/how/why you make certain types of decisions [2]. Working on staying aligned with your closest team, which then spent energy on staying aligned with their teams, etc. Sample randomly from the whole org, but mostly at your pace.
The biggest mistake I've made was that I've pulled myself (for legitimate reasons, it seemed) from having a true conversation with every single hire before they've gotten an offer, when we were around 70. 30 minutes is typically enough, but I feel you need a singular person as a gatekeeper for the final values-fit check. Partially thinking that 70 is already good enough, but later I've come across people talking about, like, 500 people before pulling out [3] :)
[1]: https://www.bobek.cz/decisions/ [2]: https://www.bobek.cz/work-principles/ [3]: https://mastersofscale.com/reed-hastings-culture-shock/
I would not say it this way; it is too simplistic. In fact, I generally caution against the dominant metaphor here of comparing feedback to scaling. It falls apart quickly.
Here’s a counter point. In many scenarios and settings, relationships provide transitive benefits. For example, if a leader builds trusted relationships with other leaders, a significant amount of trust can flow through that relationship.
To build a better understanding, I suggest building diverse models. Try to answer the question: What kind of qualities do relationships confer and why?
There’s also a generational aspect here. I started my career in the 2000 tech boom and bust. I’ve seen a lot of up-and-down cycles in the industry. I’ve seen lots of management styles and organizational cultures. People that had formative years during peak social media and/or COVID often have a different kind of socialization and this affects their default expectations. I won’t attach normative judgments without research, but there are significant differences.
When I think of the most impressive collaborations I’ve participated in with amazing results, relatively few of them involve tech organizations.
Building a scalable culture over various company sizes feels hard in the sense that generalizing prescriptive advice is tricky. A two person start up is cake because you only have to manage one internal relationship (a pair). People know great culture when they see it, but that is nothing like growing it.
Though I agree with the larger point, there is a critical way to overcome that. The second line of leadership must own the culture at their team's level. This only works if you have direct access to the larger group. An open-door policy where anyone can schedule time with you is essential.
You might not understand their struggle, but you can hear and route it to the right people. Sometimes the best way to show empathy is simply to listen.
In my experience, open door policies are necessary but not sufficient. If the policy is to wait for feedback to walk through your door you will only hear from the set of people motivated, willing, and trusting enough to do that.
You have to go out and ask everyone one by one the appropriate questions and also be willing to listen. I’ve been in some companies where feedback was requested but then the immediate reaction was to argue and deny any feedback given, which is a fast path to ensure people stop providing feedback.
At the same time, accepting and acting on feedback is a skill in its own right.