A perspective on the recent massive tech layoffs

Are companies getting sort of double trapped in a couple of basics?

Reality is obviously messy and there is hardly anything of such a nature that will have a single reason to come about. But I believe there is something to be said, as a hypothesis, on the recent massive tech layoffs which perhaps goes a bit counter to the common logic applied, which is to attribute it largely to the worsening of the global economic situation.

That is not the same as questioning that as a concrete factor at play. It is, and with significant potential of damage. But one could argue that organizations which want to be future-proof need to be resilient and capable of navigating through turbulent waters without too much of an impact. Adjustments, maybe. The level we are often seeing in the layoffs are an order of magnitude larger than that.

They may be a weak signal rather of more fundamental things at play. Notice the nuance of the plural. Here again possibly many factors with relevant potential of influence.

And I want to bring about a couple of basics that I believe might be connected, and with that to pay off a small tribute to the recent passing of a reference in software development research.

Brooks’ Law – or time and scope don’t interact necessarily in a linear fashion

Fred Books, who passed on November 17th, in his reference work The Mythical Man-Month, made the observation that adding additional manpower to a software development project might backfire and make it take longer, not shorter. And that is what we commonly refer to as Brooks’ Law.

That is not only empirically demonstrated, but it also makes logical sense:

·         It takes time to a new engineer to start adding value to a project. And in fact, it may consume other people’s time to that ramp up to effectively happen.

·         Communication overhead increases as the number of people increases, and likely in an exponential way.

·         Knowledge work such as software development are less divisible than other more mechanical endeavours. Brooks uses here a metaphor, which I know some people think of it as politically incorrect, but it does properly illustrate the concept: "nine women can't make a baby in one month".

The point, and in fact the connection, I am trying to make is that I do believe many ‘startups’, ‘scaleups’, and potentially even more established organizations, still too often fall into that trap that Brooks’ Law warns us about. In the sense that there is strong focus on that exponential growth requires exponential team size growth as well.

That doesn’t have to be the case, and it can in fact add to complexity arguably in an unnecessary fashion – as one could argue that as things are already getting more complex with additional customers and such interactions, one should be extra careful to not self-inflict additional complexity with too much of a growth in team size at the same time.

A recent article by Jason Fried, Co-Founder and CEO at 37signals, makers of Basecamp and HEY, go exact along those lines of questioning that logic: https://world.hey.com/jason/on-company-size-8095488d.

The fundamental idea being that:

There is always choice – and you can deliberately choose to do less, but better.

Which bring us to the second point.

Good old project management 101 is still a thing

Now, I know that some people still have a sort of binary, dichotomic view of the world. And in that context some have kind of declared the death of project management in favour of a product based perspective on working. I think that misses so many points, in so many angles, but I won’t have the time to dig into that here. Let’s just say that being product based doesn’t rule out that, at the end of the day, you will shape up some work to be done, as part of your designed experiments of a hypothesis, or something like that, which ultimately can be seen a kind of (small) project.

My point though goes a bit more basic than that… To talk about the general trade-off time and scope, which as we have seen with Brooks’ Law does not even happen on a linear fashion. Yet we still fundamentally can state this:

The more work you want to get done, the more tendency that it will take longer.

Which bring us nicely back to the question of choice, and deliberation…

Putting it all together, what I am claiming, or hypothesizing, is that tech companies may be too easily falling into that sort of double trap, whereas they increase their ambitions and scope (as perhaps a reason for additional funding), and because of that logically think that they need additional capacity to execute, but sort of ‘overdose’ that in a such a way that make things harder, not easier.

There is beauty in keeping team size growth in check and grow it as truly demand increases and you cannot afford to defer commitments any longer.

Until you can, you are probably better off exercising hard and deliberate choices on what – and even when there, what parts are truly essential for now – and you can execute by when. Again, basic project management still a (relevant) thing, perhaps even more so in a knowledge work context such as technology and their inherent complexities (like Brooks Law).

by Rodrigo Sperb, feel free to connect (I only refuse invites from people clearly with an agenda to ‘coldly’ sell something to me), happy to engage and interact