Orders of magnitude

"When people say they're looking to grow by an order of magnitude they usually mean ten times."<p>I think this gives "people" too much credit.<p>In my experience when people say they're looking to grow by an order of magnitude, they don't know that has a very specific meaning and they're just talking about getting bigger by some vague undefined number that could be anything from about two times on up.

Growing infrastructure by orders of magnitude makes more sense to me, and is often how I hear the term used. I was at a conference in Berlin a few years ago and Joyent gave a talk about scaling which touched on this very topic.<p>The argument given was that you should plan infrastructure expansion with orders of magnitude. For example, increasing disk space from 10tb to 100tb. Or replacing a network switch with one that has 10x traffic capacity. The reasoning goes that the time spent engineering the expansion is a better investment at 10x, rather than having to increase infrastructure incrementally.

My company recently grew by 1000% in less than 24 hours with regards to user base (and even higher with regards to content created and user interactions). Same product, same team, but perception of our company to outsiders has changed entirely. On the inside the only difference has been stepping up our support game, and having the opportunity to try things out on a much large scale -- plus server expenses...

Tangent: One of my favorite classes in college was one that taught physics only at the level of order of magnitudes. It'd tackle questions like: Why is nuclear power more efficient than coal? How much more efficient? and then sought to answer those questions in terms of simple math and fundamental constants.<p>Considering problems/situations from an orders of magnitude point of view is an under appreciated approach IMO.<p>Of course the orders of magnitude argument get abused by marketing people (but what doesn't?). That aside, they're extremely valuable for personal or team understanding of the problems and goals.

I liked the commenter on the article that suggested using fold as a unit of measure. Grow 2 fold, etc. That's how I think of things. Sometimes if you think about growing in orders of magnitude you end up with too high of an expectation. If you're just simply looking to double or triple, you're more likely to reach the mark, and even exceed it, which is probably better for morale.

I've heard "10x" (pronounced "ten ex") very often and I think it's less confusing than <i>"one order of magnitude"</i>.