[HN Gopher] Tiny Teams Playbook
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Tiny Teams Playbook
Author : tilt
Score : 49 points
Date : 2025-10-08 12:50 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.latent.space)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.latent.space)
| monadoid wrote:
| `Simple, Boring Tech Stack: shell scripts over k8s, keep code
| modular`. wut
| hshdhdhehd wrote:
| I think now k8s is boring and shell scripts exciting.
| klardotsh wrote:
| The office or otherwise mandatory frequent in person work
| sessions bit seems pretty at odds with the underlying idea that
| you're a team focused on actually delivering and building with
| deep focus. What does commuting a half hour, hour, or more, each
| way to an office to put my headphones on and zone in, do to
| achieve any of that? I'm gonna be able to do that more
| effectively, more focusedly, and at the hours I'm most
| productive, remotely. The commute is strictly a distraction.
| awalsh128 wrote:
| Same. I find myself much more productive. I do like coming in
| every once in awhile for the rapport and cultivating working
| relationships face to face though.
| klardotsh wrote:
| Yep, 2-4x onsites together a year to develop human
| relationships, and otherwise 100% remote, is by far the most
| effective team arrangement IME. It is especially the most
| accessible format for people who do not necessarily perform
| their best work within the typical office hours (9-5, +/-1),
| who do not want to live in your metro area, or who are
| distracted by disturbances in their surroundings - or just
| aren't hardcore extroverts.
|
| Or simply put: if you truly want the best, most focused,
| highly performing team, an office requirement shrinks your
| talent pool tremendously for extremely little gain. Do
| quarterly meetups somewhere and move on, IMO.
| leetrout wrote:
| Quarterly is a lot, depending on travel distance and
| whether weekends are needed for travel, for folks with
| families.
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| The commute doesn't help you, but working in an office next to
| your team mates will accelerate your work.
|
| Software development is a team sport and individual
| productivity is not the same as team productivity.
| Communication bandwidth in person is much higher when
| colocated. Startups move fast and higher bandwidth increases
| velocity, reduces errors, improves quality and team cohesion.
|
| For other situations remote can be "good enough", and has
| advantages eg bigger recruitment pool or cheaper labour, but in
| general in person is just going to be a lot faster with higher
| quality results.
|
| A lot of engineers don't wish this to be true, because wfh is
| often better for them as individuals, but it is what it is.
| klardotsh wrote:
| I've worked in plenty of startups (the overwhelming majority
| of my career, actually) and did not perceive the performance
| of in-office teams to be significantly better than the remote
| teams I've been on. The floor is probably lower for remote
| teams (in that ineffective remote teams are horribly
| ineffective), but the ceiling is comparable, and the average
| is (again, in my experience) anywhere from comparable to
| slightly better, because folks are working the ways+hours
| they're most effective, not what someone else thinks should
| be the most effective.
| copperroof wrote:
| I use this kind of opinion as my idiot bat signal now. It's
| so obviously untrue when someone starts spouting this
| nonsense you know they are a very feelings based decision
| maker.
| weinzierl wrote:
| _" Almost no meetings: "deep focus" - building instead of talking
| about building"_
|
| I used to work in an environment with often 8 hours of meetings
| straight. People had their headsets on while being in meetings
| and were simultaneously programming and when they heard their
| name mentioned they tried to say something smart. It was a
| terribly inefficient way to work.
|
| Then I switched to an environment where we took _" Almost no
| meetings"_ seriously and it was a tremendous boost. After a year
| or so I realized that we left a lot of potential efficiency
| untapped because of lack of communication or miss-communication.
|
| Now I think there must be a middle ground - an optimum of
| communication for an optimum of efficiency. Teams need to be
| actively steered to that, just hiring good communicators and
| hoping for the best is probably not going to work. You need
| meetings. At least some. And some seemingly inefficient meetings
| will prevent inefficiency elsewhere.
|
| Everything I wrote above was about highly distributed teams
| working remotely. The Tiny Teams Playbook has also
|
| _" In Person: either have an office, or VERY frequent AirBnB
| hack weeks"_
|
| in it, which changes things quite a bit.
| the_duke wrote:
| That middle ground for me is what I like to call "proposal
| driven development".
|
| Ideas, concepts, implementation plans are first written down as
| a proposal, which is read by others and discussed online.
| Meetings are only required if there are blockers to resolve, or
| differences in opinion.
| abuani wrote:
| This was a very challenging article to read. Not because any of
| the concepts described, but for the way ideas are thrown around
| and organized. This looks like it was written by a set of llm
| agents that were instructed to write an article without a clear
| outlined, and then the author took what they felt were the best
| bits and hit publish.
| leetrout wrote:
| > Camaraderie, speed: Have fun, do retreats, avoid burnout
|
| Or, alternatively, respect personal boundaries and don't force
| coworkers to have social outings.
|
| I really wish "work is just work" was more popular. There is an
| empathetic way to do this that isn't just treating people as a
| number but also not forcing socializing outside of the context of
| work.
|
| Yes to avoiding burnout. No to thinking a retreat is the answer
| to that.
| fra wrote:
| Hacker News formula for startups: no offices, no offsites, no
| meetings, and no MBAs. If only idiot CEOs and rapacious VCs
| were listening!
| leetrout wrote:
| Not quite.
|
| Have an onsite team or have hybrid setups that bring people
| within geographic areas together. Nothing replaces getting
| around a physical whiteboard in a physical space.
|
| Context is in the original statement that retreats are a fix
| for burnout.
| swyx wrote:
| (i'm the author) thanks for posting OP! here's the youtube full
| playlist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQz-
| PgA1eJw&list=PLcfpQ4tk2k...
|
| more thoughts after about 6 months of stewing with the Tiny Teams
| idea:
|
| the more work experience I have in tech, the more I see the
| inverse relationship between size of team and velocity on
| projects. I think Zuck aside, the race towards 10-20mm comp
| packages for high velocity AI engineers (both the kind that are
| very good at using coding agents and the kind that ship AI
| products) is a direct economic consequence of this very human
| observation meshed with the reduction in cost of shipping
| software as long as you have a very good
| supervisor/prompter/architect to keep things on rails.
|
| I actually think the biggest casualty of this is 1) people with
| "bullshit jobs" in tech e.g. "product managers" that are actually
| "project managers" that call in on zoom from their poolside to
| ask "ok what's your ETA on that?" on their jira board twice a
| week, and 2) the VC industry since (if you dont pay a ton of cash
| comp) companies are close to profitable
| (https://www.swyx.io/cognition) after an initial ramp due to the
| insane labor leverage. the one-and-done round i think is going to
| be increasingly common in VC.
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