Information Compression - by Alexandr Wang
alexw.substack.com · 1,226 words · saved by 1 readers
Why the wrong thing happens
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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