> All of the above took roughly the same headcount LinkedIn now has. The technology team writing and running all that custom software was maybe 200-300 people.
> So even after I hear all the reasons LinkedIn has to be so huge (sales, support, scale, etc), I'm still left scratching my head.
The reason for your head-scratching is unclear. Your previous company had about the same headcount as LinkedIn.
LinkedIn, being an international company even before Microsoft’s acquisition, probably has a similar level of necessary personnel, including internal and external software development teams.
I don’t see the reason for your confusion from what you’ve written. Perhaps explicitly stating a point of difference between your previous company and LinkedIn would clarify?
>assess remote employees is by what they're delivering
I agree but that is easier said than done.
Software is very intangible and creative and I do not have experience in managing other developers.
One of my employees is a university dropout with 3 years working experience from a developing country and is the only developer other than me.
I have no clue what's the amount of code he's suppose to deliver. I have very little metrics of reference to work with.
> There’s some irony in the business the OP describes hires programmers out to multiple customers. That means the owners and managers of the company are working multiple jobs.
Interesting point. Didn't thought about that yet! I wouldn't say the situtations are exactly the same, but they share a lot of details.
> If you don't trust your employees why did you hire them?
On a small company, I agree. But on FB they're around 5k people. Let's say they have 3k engineers, that's a awful lot of people they're trusting with their source code
> But I think web development easily swamps that kind of work in terms of number of developers.
does it though. IBM alone, a service company, has 380000 employees. And there are tons of service companies like that - at least in my country they are mostly doing Java and the like.
> My company (at the time) ended up hiring a fulltime person to manage the complexity (ie an Atlassian admin) plus a few consultants to get the workflow stuff down
Offtopic - I have recently been trying to break into full-time consulting / contracting. May I know how you went about hiring the consultants for the migration ?
> As a cost savings measure my employer recently moved our entire organization from Slack to Microsoft Teams. I used to assume both products were similar, but I have much more appreciation for Slack as a product now.
Same, and OMG is this true. Slack may be less than ideal but it is so much better than Teams.
But its not organizational memory, its really for basically ephemeral comms. Yes, you can dig back for stuff but its not great for that, and finding things is horrible.
I meant the remote worker builds and maintains an API, not that he himself is an API.
> culture is an extremely important aspect of building a successful business
Yes, maybe; but there are many businesses that are already built and that would benefit from treating some parts of their process as self-enclosed APIs.
I would go so far as saying many already do, without knowing it.
I met a project manager like this on a client implementation a few years ago.
The client felt they needed 7 phases (requirements gathering, analysis, design etc. etc.) - this is for a SaaS product but whatever!
They also felt there were 8 business areas that each needed to be treated separately (support staff, retail, warehouse, etc. etc.).
So the day after we signed the contract I came in to find my inbox bulging with 56 (i.e. 7 x 8) two-hour meeting invites from the meeting terrorist. There was one for each combo of phase and business area - e.g. a two hour meeting for requirements gathering for the support staff area, another for design for the warehouse area, and so on. There were no delays between phases.
Untangling that shitfest did not start the project out on a good footing.
>>Any company doing a 3-year SAP implementation is a very large company.
Not at all. I have a client with ~100 employees who are past year 2 of their Salesforce implementation because the director of technology keeps changing priorities and project requirements.
This is the hard part for me because they do anything from hosting private clouds to buying a digital signage solution and re-selling it as their own.
My business is just consulting and developing. So far my job has been to develop a digital signage solution. Which would be in direct competition with them but I'm not left many options.
They even have a developer department. So the very nature of my employer makes it almost impossible for me to start anything in IT.
Could also have been created with SCIM and you're in a particular SCIM group that other folks are not in.
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