[mkipper]

There's a difference between saying "I could bang that out in a weekend and replace the whole department" and recognizing that 3,000 people supporting a relatively small feature is a sign of bloat in an organization. Surely there's _some_ point where the headcount becomes a sign of a problem -- would it be okay to make OP's comment if 100,000 people were working that feature?

I agree with your general point that a "software team" in a big org requires a lot more people than just engineers developing new features, and that the headcount doesn't necessarily scale linearly. That doesn't change the fact that in a normal business, if 3,000 full-time staff (support staff and all) are working on something, it's probably something pretty big that generates enough revenue or has enough growth potential to justify that cost. Even if a team is working hard and "doing stuff", they can still be grossly overstaffed.