Three Years and Two Hundred Engineers Later

Ben and Laura look back at how their Austin startup evolved from a scrappy team of twenty to a massive organization.

Three Years and Two Hundred Engineers Later

Listen and choose the right answer

Why is the company currently slower at deploying features?

• Because the codebase is written in an outdated programming language.
• Because of a growing headcount, coordination costs, and a forgotten approval rule.
• Because they fired most of their senior developers in Boston.

What did Ben discover about the mandatory security sign-off?

• He had created it himself in a panic two years ago during an outage.
• It was mandated by external legal investors from New York.
• Laura had installed it without telling the engineering leads.

How does Laura describe the impact of growing the team so rapidly?

• She believes it solved all their previous architectural problems.
• She considers some dilution of culture and higher overhead inevitable.
• She thinks it had zero effect on their daily communication.

What do Ben and Laura decide to do at the end of the conversation?

• To hire fifty more engineers immediately.
• To remove Ben's old approval rule and update their deployment guidelines.
• To rewrite the entire software monolith from scratch.

Listen again and complete the sentences

• Laura: Of course I have, Ben, but what did you expect with our growing headcount? A team of two hundred developers has a massive ____ .
• Ben: True, but this ____ phase feels like it's crushing our startup scrappiness completely.
• Laura: Look, we had to professionalize after that major database crash in Boston. That ____ brought in brilliant people, but we needed to codify practices.
• Ben: I know, but our ____ is through the roof now. Every minor feature update takes three weeks of reviews.
• Laura: That's just ____ in action. Our new organizational layers dictate our messy software architecture.

Sources: photo by Thirdman on Pexels