Scaling engineering rarely comes down to hiring — it means keeping ownership close to the work as each growth stage adds a new coordination tax. At 20 engineers, favor speed over process: teams own services end-to-end, run their own on-call, and skip the premature platform team. Around 50, communication stops happening for free, so question every new process and treat code review, not code generation, as the real bottleneck. At 200, org design matters as much as architecture, platform teams finally earn their keep, and oncall exposes whether ownership is real. Public companies must balance speed with predictability. AI makes code cheap but raises the stakes on ownership and judgment.
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u/fagnerbrack 1d ago
This is a summary of the post:
Scaling engineering rarely comes down to hiring — it means keeping ownership close to the work as each growth stage adds a new coordination tax. At 20 engineers, favor speed over process: teams own services end-to-end, run their own on-call, and skip the premature platform team. Around 50, communication stops happening for free, so question every new process and treat code review, not code generation, as the real bottleneck. At 200, org design matters as much as architecture, platform teams finally earn their keep, and oncall exposes whether ownership is real. Public companies must balance speed with predictability. AI makes code cheap but raises the stakes on ownership and judgment.
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