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Specialization and the Hive Mind

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This post describes a two-part framework on how to run organizations that are outliers in terms of productivity and creativity. We'll focus especially on software engineering and related disciplines, as they are large industries that well-satisfy the criteria of the framework, but these ideas likely extend naturally to other fields such as aerospace, finance, pharmaceuticals, and even the broader context of academia. Some of the methods described here will come with a significant cost, so it is worth taking a brief moment to consider why outlier productivity is important. In some industries, such as those that produce commodities, returns on additional productivity are fairly linear, whereas costs may grow superlinearly; it follows that these industries fall into a stable equilibrium of productivity. However, many modern industries are not like this. In software, because the marginal cost of production is essentially zero, a product that beats the competition can rapidly scale to milli

Specialization and the Hive Mind me Specialization and the Hive Mind October 2, 2022 Introduction This post describes a two-part framework on how to run organizations that are outliers in terms of productivity and creativity. We'll focus especially on software engineering and related disciplines, as they are large industries that well-satisfy the criteria of the framework, but these ideas likely extend naturally to other fields such as aerospace, finance, pharmaceuticals, and even the broader context of academia. Some of the methods described here will come with a significant cost, so it is wo

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