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by neilv
1092 days ago
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> We had a huge project with about 20 devs that went on for a year and a half. We brought in a bunch of consultants. The leads basically spent all day herding cats, and all night coding. We all agreed we probably could have done it in half the time with just the 5 leads. 20 developers is a lot, but could in theory be worthwhile. I'd really try to get all 20 be very-effective ones and structure the responsibilities and communication so that they don't get bogged down. If you do it a naive way, and aren't lucky, it'd be easy for 20 1x..10x developers to become 0.01x developers. Or, if you get people who just want to call themselves a "dev" and grind concrete task assignments in a straightforward way, then I think you either need to be doing something bog-standard and naturally amendable to just going through the motions (e.g., scalable Web CRUD, or yet another forum/chat app), or you need a brilliant approach to structuring the work. |
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I don't think it makes sense to talk in terms of absolute numbers. It depends on the size of the company and what they're trying to build. It's more like "n good developers are faster than 10*n shit developers". If you have enough essential complexity in what you're selling to your users you could realistically have 50s or 100s of developers where every single one of them is like "startup grade" and has their own projects with their own responsibilites, their own autonomy and low communication overhead.
The problem isn't companies that have 200 devs. It's companies that have 2000 devs that could run with 200 (or companies that have 200 devs that could run with 20, or companies with 20 that get outcompeted by 2 people in a garage). I've seen all of them at some point in consulting.