[jeffbee]

I don't think it's about largeness, and the autonomy of "rockstars" is of dubious value. Google is the largest company where I've worked, and also the most productive. For code that an IC owns, they only need the sign-off of literally anyone else in the company to land changes, and all that is expected is those changes are generally consistent with team goals. For code an IC does not own, they only need the approval of one owner. Pretty straight-forward.

A medium-sized company where I worked had a "rockstar" who was really just an early employee with a high title and no idea what he was doing, so every week he committed a thousand lines of brand-new unreviewed tech debt. Much of the rest of the company was unwittingly dedicated to overcoming his tech debt. Said company currently trades at about 1/3rd below its IPO valuation.

The experience of these two companies led me to the belief that hiring practices and review culture are more important than project management culture. You can get a lot done with good talent, code and design review, and vaguely disorganized project leadership, and you can run in place achieving nothing with formal project management hamstrung by bozo engineers.

[carlisle_]

> and the autonomy of "rockstars" is of dubious value.

I agree, but with your example, I wouldn’t call somebody committing massive amounts of tech debt a “rock star”. I used the term fairly facetiously anyway, because I think we all know the 10x engineer is a myth.