[10x-dev]

In my experience it's the coordination and mental overhead between the platform teams that kills productivity.

I suspect that hiring and training cross platform developers, then having them own a feature across all platforms will significantly increase speed of delivery of that feature. These are typically called feature teams and they are most effective when there are backend developers on the team as well.

The trade-off is that now the new feature teams are not communicating between each other and coordinating on the common code between them, which starts affecting productivity.

In the end, regardless of how the new VP of engineering likes to split the teams and get praised for solving the current problem by introducing another one down the road, the trade off for increased size is loss of productivity due to synchronization overhead between the people involved.

[blacktriangle]

I've been the cross-platform dev implementing every feature across 3 platforms, its a miserable job. Besides feeling like you're living through Groundhog Day, the mental burden of constant context switches between languages and APIs wears you down over time, and that's before you look at the effort required to stay current on all your supported platforms.

I would never organize a business like that again.