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Communication Models and How They Scale

Mite Mitreski
Better Programming
Published in
6 min readOct 26, 2022

Photo by Dylan Gillis on Unsplash

Smaller companies have short communication cycles and run fast. The network is small and everyone knows everyone, what they work on, or their personal lives. Everyone is wearing many hats that are all possible and everyone is reachable

The numbers show that the number grows quite a bit with more people in the mix.

Imagine you have your entire company of 𝑛 people who need to meet each outer on a 1:1 intro with everyone else. If you focus on one person you will see that they will take part in 𝑛−1 introductions. Since there are 𝑛 people, that would lead to 𝑛(𝑛−1) intros. Alice meeting Bob is the same as Bob meeting Alice making the number of introductions 𝑛(𝑛−1)/2.

So having Alice, Bob and Carol we have 3 (3–1)/2 leading to 3 channels which are not that bad.

Small group illustrated

So for a standard 9-person team that definitely can be fed with 2 pizzas, we get 9*8/2= 36 different communication channels adding to something like this:

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