How to maintain engineering velocity as you scale
<i>&quot;Hiring the best engineers&quot;</i><p>Every company can&#x27;t have the best engineers. They cost too much and they&#x27;re a finite resource. I would argue that the quality of engineers is just going down, too, as the hiring pool is flooded with people who&#x27;ve had zero tech experience, and then took a bootcamp and &quot;churned on algorithms&quot; to finally land a tech job. You probably will end up with poor to average engineers, and you&#x27;ll have to deal with that.<p><i>&quot;Building solid long-term foundations from day one&quot;</i><p>You have average engineers. The foundations they make are not going to be solid. And even if they could make solid foundations, your founders won&#x27;t care. They just want to ship ship ship ship ship. So your foundations aren&#x27;t going to be solid... and you&#x27;ll have to deal with that.<p><i>&quot;Tracking metrics to guide decision-making&quot;</i><p>Never seen it done well. If you have the time and staff to properly do this, you&#x27;re either crazy lucky or are swimming in cash. Those days are probably gone... and you&#x27;ll have to deal with that.<p><i>&quot;Keeping teams small and independent&quot;</i><p>Remember Conway&#x27;s Law? The more teams you have, the more fractured your architecture becomes. Obviously you can&#x27;t have one infinitely big team, so the key is to have as few teams as you can get away with. Integrate them tightly - same standards, same methods of communication and work. Eliminate monopolies of knowledge. Enforce workflows that naturally leads to everyone being more informed. (For example, every team having stand-up on a video call means none of the teams have any idea what the other teams are doing)<p>There&#x27;s actually a lot of evidence-based research and practical experience out there, that&#x27;s been around for <i>decades</i>, that shows how to maintain the productivity of organizations, regardless of whether they&#x27;re growing or not. But they&#x27;re not trendy, so nobody working today gives a crap. Actual productivity gets ignored while managers pat themselves on the back and start-ups churn out banal blog posts with the same lame advice that <i>thousands</i> of startups have used and still completely failed to maintain velocity with. We all know how startups today really get by: burning through staff and money, and luck.