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lethain.com · 500 words · saved by 1 readers

Back in 2018, when I first wrote about sizing engineering teams, I was surprised how much my advice rankled a colleague. He wanted to spin up a new engineering team of two people, which I thought was a bad idea. It would be a fragile team that would fall apart quickly if it didn’t grow. It would be missing the components we’d seen make other teams successful, like an engaged manager or ability to handle on-call if someone took a vacation.

Back in 2018, when I first wrote about sizing engineering teams, I was surprised how much my advice rankled a colleague. He wanted to spin up a new engineering team of two people, which I thought was a bad idea. It would be a fragile team that would fall apart quickly if it didn’t grow. It would be missing the components we’d seen make other teams successful, like an engaged manager or ability to handle on-call if someone took a vacation. Finally, I argued that there was no real advantage to creating a new team, you could accomplish the same goals by just focusing two members of an existing…

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