Scales and Emergent Properties

It is fascinating how things look different depending on the distance. From space Earth looks like a blue ball with some green stuff here and there. By zooming closer one can see the continents and mountains and some of the biggest man-made structures like highways. Going closer still and taking a helicopter view the individual houses are yet indistinguishable, but cities have forms.

Humans can't usually see the forest for the trees. Trees are closer to our scale and we usually look at them from the ground up, not from top down. Also we and all the organic material around us consists of small cells. Many of them have a specific purposes (like muscle or brain cells). They are visible with a microscope.

If you could magnify even more, you would see that even the cells aren't the ultimate building blocks. They could be further divided into atoms which could be further divided into quarks (and maybe even further, but let's stop here.)

Many of these levels have their own forces and interactions. Quarks can feel the strong interaction (or nuclear force). In their world, gravity or electromagnetism isn't very interesting. On the other hand, interactions and events on the cosmic scale take so long and distances are so big that compared to them the human lifespan is only a drop in an ocean.

The same fascinating scale related properties exist also in the corporate world. Individual people, teams, units and companies work on different scales. After saying this I do admit that some exceptional individuals might match the output of a whole team or even a small company. But I'd claim that there are such efforts that simply aren't doable without the appropriate size. And yes, on the other hand bigger scale usually makes things more stiff and slower.

I think a team has a lot better chances to really finish a software feature. And I mean the whole deal: thinking about the usability, implementation, documentation, testing, optimizing, refactoring and packaging everything into an appealing form. And if we go a bit further and think about productization of an idea, I think a company is better off than a team or an individual. Sales and marketing are essential activities. But such capabilities aren't often found in the standard developer skill set. For a company to be successful, both skills are needed. But individual people can be highly successful in their roles with only one of these skills.

No-one can do everything. By working together we can make great things happen. With the joint effort of brilliant minds we have been able to reach the space and descend into the deepest ocean depths. If we could work together as a planet who knows where we would end up... But currently I'm happy to follow the road ahead with my company. :)