[legitster]

I worked in fast food and this resonates extremely with me. There were only 4-5 people in a kitchen during the busy rush, and there was a list everyone knew of people they didn't want to get stuck in a shift with. If someone sucks to work with, it really sucks, and because everyone is pitching in and working together, there is no indication that the person was bad at their job. If you were fired, it was usually because your fellow workers said you were bad.

I'm all on board with better pay and benefits. But protecting mediocrity doesn't benefit customers or other workers. Companies may occasionally arbitrarily fire good employees without a good cause, but that would be their loss.

One thing you'll notice in employee-owned companies (as opposed to unionized companies) is that they generally do no tolerate such clauses in their contracts.

[shagie]

Price's Law is "50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work."

https://dariusforoux.com/prices-law/

https://routine.co/blog/what-is-the-prices-law-and-why-is-it...

[hughesjj]

"law" is an incredible term used for "an observation a physicist made about the author citations of academic papers at one point in time", especially when you try to extend that to software development, and realize that there's other competing theories with supposedly better fits. I have not independently re-run the analysis myself, but lotka's law claims to be better an in general these are all special cases of zipf's laws, which is admittedly where I personally first heard this concept.

...which is probably why you only see this stuff regurgitated in blog posts and right-wing Malcolm gladwell (Jordan Peterson is quoted as the source in one of your cited blog posts).

Either way, I'd be highly, highly suspect of parroting Price's "law" as a fact.

(I get stuff like Conway's law or Moore or Murphy are all also cited as laws, and I don't like that terminology either. "Conjecture" would fit so much better, save for Murphy's)

Even if the law were true regarding authorship, and applied to software, that still wouldn't show that the "valuable contributions" are only made by virtue of a small set of excellent contributors -- see "Matthew effect"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect

[araes]

So, extending that rule (approximately):

All the actual work on Earth is performed by sqrt( 3,630,000,000 )[1] or:

~60,000 workers

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.TOTL.IN

"Based on choosing the current estimates of Labor force, total"

[shagie]

Half of all of the work - not all of all of the work.

[legitster]

You are missing the implication in the equation that smaller projects/teams are more efficient.

[hughesjj]

Gotcha, Singleton sole proprietorships it is. Down with complexity, break up every business! /s

[Dylan16807]

You're making a fine argument against optimizing for one variable. But that doesn't discredit the "law".

[ars]

Is everyone on earth working on the same project?