Small is The New Big
Joe's Nerdy Rants #82 - Weekend reads, podcasts, and other stuff
Keeping this pretty short as I’m traveling this weekend.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy made headlines this week when he said that Amazon would look for avenues to replace its workforce with AI. He joins a list of other CEOs who have said very similar things. This topic was taboo until recently. Now it’s normalizing, and business leaders are saying the quiet part out loud. I expect we will see many more public statements like this from leaders of all industries and types of companies.
Big companies are cutting their workforces at breakneck speeds. Whereas a few years ago, the competition was once to see which company could have the biggest workforce, it’s now the polar opposite. Org charts are flattening. Management is being gutted, and ICs (whoever is left) are bearing the weight of a lot more work. And now with AI in the mix, ICs are expected to be ever more productive. Once AI agents become more enterprise-grade, ICs will be managing agents. Or, if you believe Open AI’s Greg Brockman, perhaps we’ll all be taking our cues from AI managers. Who knows, but either scenario requires far fewer people.
This flies in the face of how I would hear people talk about their teams, and by proxy, their measurements of success. For the longest time, the notion was that if you led a big team, that was a major success in itself. More headcount, more budget, bigger kingdom, more “power.” I heard a CDO brag about running an 800-person data team at a mature company. I’m not sure what the leader accomplished during their tenure, as it was brief (the tenure of CDOs is notoriously short). The results and output of that team were questionable at best. It seemed like most people on the team were “lifers,” collecting a paycheck and phoning it in. I suppose that’s how it goes in many big companies. When teams are big, it’s easy to blend into the woodwork and coast. Meanwhile, the leaders are busy doing “leader stuff” - endless meetings, Machiavellian maneuvering, posting leadership tall tales on LinkedIn, angling for the next promotion or job to do it all over again. It mostly looks like LARPing and performance theater.
Given the focus on doing more with less, I expect the emphasis on big teams will be a thing of the past. I think the entire equation is going to be inverted. The expectation is you’ll produce outsized outcomes with as few people as possible. The bragging rights will not be about an 800-person data team or an 8000-person data team, but about an 8-person data team that is producing more value per unit of time than an 8000-person data team.
I’m a fan of cutting the fat in business. I’m also averse to working in large companies because they move so damn slow. I prefer small teams because they are nimble and fast. We make decisions and execute them with brutal speed and precision. By the time the big team comes to a consensus, the landscape has already shifted. In an age of exponential change, being slow and bulky is a death sentence.
Small is the new big.
Please listen to the audio above or on Spotify (or your podcast platform of choice).
Have a wonderful weekend,
Joe
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Cool Weekend Reads
Here are some cool articles I read this week. Enjoy!
AI will shrink Amazon's workforce in the coming years, CEO Jassy says
Amazon CEO Says AI Will Lead to Smaller Workforce
ChatGPT's Impact On Our Brains According to an MIT Study | TIME
Pitfalls of premature closure with LLM assisted coding
Is your AI safe? Threat analysis of MCP (Model Context Protocol)
Background to the pattern of the "Context Plane"
AI coding assistants aren’t really making devs feel more productive - LeadDev
Iceland - Global Data Summit, June 23-24. Register here
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Fall US and European Tour - TBA
More to be announced soon…
Podcasts
Freestyle Fridays - Small is the New Big, AI Native Data Architectures, and More (Spotify)
Gordon Wong - The Impact of AI on Attention and Expertise, Platform Wars, and More (Spotify, YouTube)
Freestyle Fridays - Next-Generation Data Architectures. Ramblings and Musings (Spotify)
Zhamak Dehghani - Autonomous Data Products, Decentralized Data and AI, and More (Spotify, YouTube)
Matthew Scullion - The Agentic Data Engineering Team (Spotify, YouTube)
Freestyle Fridays - Platform or Predator? (Spotify)
Svetlana Tarnagurskaja - Building a Boutique Data Consultancy (Spotify, YouTube)
DuckLake w/ Hannes Mühleisen - Practical Data Lunch and Learn. June 4, 2025 (Spotify, YouTube)
Ash Smith - Data Products, Interoperability, Data Teams, and More (Spotify, YouTube)
Freestyle Fridays - So You Want to Work in Data? w/ Gordon Wong (Spotify)
Hamilton Ulmer - Instant SQL with DuckDB/MotherDuck - Practical Data Lunch and Learn (Spotify)
Gaëlle Seret - Change Management in Large Organizations (Spotify)
Freestyle Fridays - AI Denialism is Holding Back the Data Industry (Spotify)
Ryan Russon - Practical ML Engineering (Spotify)
Freestyle Fridays - What Does AI Do to The Craft of Dev and Engineering? (Spotify)
Laura McDonald - Navigating the Complex World of Enterprise Sales (Spotify)
There are way more episodes over at the Joe Reis Show, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Also available on YouTube.
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Joe Reis