The Spice of Life
How many people will you work with in your career?
There’s no single correct answer to the question. Do you “work with” everyone at your company? Even the CEO who probably doesn’t even know your name? Maybe if we’re being generous. What about vendors and customers and all of the other people that you only meet because of your job? Maybe if we’re being generous.
Let’s not be generous.
Let’s focus just on your immediate team. You certainly work with those people, right? This will also double as “number of reports” for those managers out there.
Now for some math.
The optimum team is around 7 people. You’ll have larger teams and smaller teams, but they’ll average out over time. It seems a bit optimistic that the average team size will be optimum though, and we’re not being generous. Let’s assume teams of 6 for this exercise. Of course, one of those team members is you. So you work with 5 people at any given time via this conservative estimate.
The average career length is about 42 years (in the United States, YMMV). The average job length is a little over 4 years according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. So you’ll likely have 10 jobs over your career. Since my audience is mostly tech folks it’s likely to be even higher, but let’s not be generous.
