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# generals
Slackbot
08/10/2023, 9:04 PMThis message was deleted.
a
Ala Shiban
08/10/2023, 9:29 PMwhat stage of the company are you guys in? (or total engineering size is an indicator)
a
Andrew Fong
08/10/2023, 9:58 PMdepends what your goals are and what type of company
b
Bradley Sickles
08/10/2023, 10:00 PMThere was a blog post about this from the Netflix team (iirc)
The numbers I've seen is that a platform team starts generating substantial leverage at 100 engineers
That was a few years ago and I think the number has dropped in terms of providing initial leverage
However, I've seen teams of 5 service 1000 eng org
d
Dave Thompson
08/10/2023, 10:00 PMI’m mostly interested in mid-to-large size organizations at companies where the primary product is software. 100-to-1000 engineers.
a
Andrew Fong
08/10/2023, 10:01 PMare you a software infra or saas?
Andrew Fong
08/10/2023, 10:01 PMi am guessing you aren’t including core business capabilities in platform
Andrew Fong
08/10/2023, 10:02 PMthings like identity, auth, core libraries at business logic layer etc
d
Dave Thompson
08/10/2023, 10:02 PMI’m coming from the perspective of a saas company.
Dave Thompson
08/10/2023, 10:03 PMThat’s an interesting question about where the line is drawn about what fits into platform. Is auth and core libraries platform or product?
a
Andrew Fong
08/10/2023, 10:03 PMi would target ~20% for saas
Andrew Fong
08/10/2023, 10:03 PMif you include things like reliability, tpm etc in that hc
d
Dave Thompson
08/10/2023, 10:04 PMIn my opinion things like auth and core libraries fit into the platform space, as those are typically the features that every product team needs to bootstrap their services.
a
Andrew Fong
08/10/2023, 10:04 PMif you start including data plat, security, core business layers, rpc system etc potentially 30%
Andrew Fong
08/10/2023, 10:05 PMwhen i ran platform/infra at dropbox i had ~40-45% of eng iirc
Andrew Fong
08/10/2023, 10:05 PMthat included datacenter, network eng, things like that
b
Bradley Sickles
08/10/2023, 10:06 PM@Andrew Fong with those numbers, it sounds like you're including ops
I think it's probably important to tease apart ops from Dev enablement
a
Andrew Fong
08/10/2023, 10:06 PMno i am not including that
Andrew Fong
08/10/2023, 10:06 PMdropbox builds a storage system from main()
d
Dave Thompson
08/10/2023, 10:07 PMMy rough guesstimate at average from the companies I’ve worked at is somewhere around 1/3 of funding goes to things that could potentially be bundled into the platform bucket.
a
Andrew Fong
08/10/2023, 10:07 PMit’s the same as building a cloud, we had 7y+ R&D projects on hardware
Andrew Fong
08/10/2023, 10:10 PMdev enablement will depend on what you’re doing, if you build products that go to hardware then the ratio will increase bc the complexity goes up
Andrew Fong
08/10/2023, 10:10 PMi suspect netflixes numbers do not include the work to integrate across vendors for example, it’s purely the saas service
a
Ala Shiban
08/10/2023, 10:13 PMAla Shiban
08/10/2023, 10:14 PMI wrote about the organizational progression for a blog post, I'll be sharing a followup with statistics on distributions of ratios
Ala Shiban
08/10/2023, 10:15 PMwould love to know what the ratios are for more people here