I read “The Mythical Man Month” by Fred Brooks when I graduated college to learn more about the art of managing software engineering teams, and perhaps one of the most important ideas in this book is around the relationship between scaling teams and throughput growth complexity.

Fred makes the argument that unlike construction or other blue collar professions, software throughput doesn’t increase linearly with headcount increase. And he goes on to point out that communication overhead grows by O(n^2) as more people are added to the team.

I have first hand experience with this and I totally agree with this statement, managing large teams has its own drawbacks and more often than not small focused hard working teams can operate at the same scale as those with double the size (take Twitter vs Twitter 2.0 for example!).

But what Brooks missed in this book, after reflecting on the OpenAI ouster a couple of months ago, is that talented hardworking ride or die employees can have the throughput and impact the trajectory of an organization by O(n^3).

Maybe cult is a better word for “ride or die”, but the general idea is that members of these kinds of teams all (genuinely) care about the mission and are willing to put the organization’s interests above their own personal ones.