The economics of scaling software development teams
One common theme in the development world is the vast difference in productivity between individual practitioners. Among folks with similar backgrounds, some are easily 10x more productive at delivering functional software. Software development is obviously not alone in having to deal with this, but I there are some particular attributes of software development that make dealing with this mismatch particularly difficult. The first problem is that many people seem to have the mistaken impression that if one has developers who produce output, then the output is simply the sum of the individual outputs. This is just not true by any reasonable measure and is a contributing factor to the reason many outsourcing projects end up a smoldering mess. Mathematically, each developer adds a cumulative amount of drag if the software they are writing needs to communicate with software other folks on the team are writing. As an example, suppose we have 1 developer working on a project, and he h...