Benefits of keeping teams small

A low-effort guide I dashed off in less than an hour, because I got riled up.

1. Try not to hire a team. Try pretty hard at this.
   1. Try to find a more efficient way to solve your problem that requires less labor – a smaller-footprint solution.
   2. Try to hire contractors to do specific parts that they’re really good at, and who have a well-defined interface. Your relationship to these contractors will mostly be transactional and temporary.
   3. If you must, try hiring just one person, a very smart, capable, and trustworthy generalist, who finds and supports the contractors, so all you have to do is manage the problem-and-solution part of the interface with the contractors. You will need to spend quite a bit of time making sure this lieutenant understands what you’re doing and why, so be very choosy not just about their capabilities but about how well you work together, how easily you can make yourself understood, etc.
2. If that fails, hire the smallest team that you can. Small is good because:
   1. Managing more people is more work.
      1. The relationship between number of people and management overhead is roughly O(n) but unevenly distributed; some people [...]

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First published:
January 29th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cojSyfxfqfm4kpCbk/how-to-hire-a-team

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.