[hinkley]

Fewer devs doing a lot more has always been my goal, and in hardware we would call this a vertical scaling versus horizontal scaling problem.

Horizontal scaling always incurs communication overheads faster, and as we know, developers have high communication overhead to begin with.

Human scaling is its own problem set and companies like to ramp projects up and then down again. Most of those people only think about how to get more people on board, not how to run the ship once attrition starts to condense responsibilities and reduce redundancy, especially for unpleasant tasks.

I’ve been trying to beat the idea of ergonomics into a smart but mule-headed developer (too old not to know better) for years now and it wasn’t until a combination of team shrink and having to work with code written by a couple of people who emulate his development style that all of a sudden he’s repeating things I said four years ago (of course with no self awareness of where those ideas came from). It remains to be seen if it affects how he writes code, or whether he starts practicing Do As I Say, Not As I Do, but I’m a short-timer now so it’s mostly an anthropological study at this point.