[beersigns]

Communication/Collaboration & ability to write elegant code are pretty symbiotic but I'd generally say it's harder to find someone who can elegantly design/code a system than it is to find people to talk about it(Reqs, specs etc).

[mmcconnell1618]

Smaller teams means more of the communication takes place in the 10x programmer's head rather than in multiple meetings between 1x programmers. A team of 3 10X programmers should be more efficient than 30 1x programmers simply because communication will be more efficient.

[beersigns]

Hah, my own anecdotal evidence has been in favor of smaller teams for the communications reason you cite. Probably a bit of a bad analogy but it made me think of 3 Unix processes vs 30. Way harder to manage IPC between 30 processes as opposed to 3.