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Information Compression - by Alexandr Wang

alexw.substack.com · 1,226 words · saved by 1 readers

This is a memo I sent to the Scale team in 2019 which has meaningfully changed how many people at the company have operated. I hope it is similarly useful to those not at Scale: One oft-cited reason organizations get less efficient as the number of people increases is “communication overhead". It’s a simple model. As a team grows, you spend a greater percentage of time communicating (it scales with n-squared), so you become less efficient. While it might be true, I think the far more salient reason is that information compression is incredibly hard. Unfortunately, we’re all bad information compressors—it’s part of being human. The real world is complex. For almost anything, there is some grisly reality filled with nuance, nonsensical complications, and randomness (“what’s really going on”). But, when we communicate with each other, we usually speak in a handful of complete thoughts. When Person A has to communicate a complex idea to Person B, she invariably is going to leave out a l

This is a memo I sent to the Scale team in 2019 which has meaningfully changed how many people at the company have operated. I hope it is similarly useful to those not at Scale: One oft-cited reason organizations get less efficient as the number of people increases is “communication overhead". It’s a simple model. As a team grows, you spend a greater percentage of time communicating (it scales with n-squared), so you become less efficient. While it might be true, I think the far more salient reason is that information compression is incredibly hard. Unfortunately, we’re all bad…

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