I'm honestly not even super convinced that small teams struggle to maintain large systems. I've been on a team that was only 7 good engineers maintaining a 3.5 million line project that had both a web UI and thick client. It supported 2 different databases and had a horizontally scalable job runner.
At one point it was 35 engineers, but layoffs took it down to 7, at which point we started to get a lot more done. There was just so much less time spent keeping everyone aligned. So many fewer meetings, sign-offs, reviews, plannings, retrospectives, management meetings, etc. Developers had a lot more agency, so they just got stuff done. Technical debt repayment became 50% of our time, as we easily knocked out features in the other half of the time. We kept ruthlessly cutting complexity, so it got faster to add new features.
I'm sure some projects just need more bodies, but I think there's an upper bound to how much complexity can be added to a system in a given unit of time. Adding developers over a threshold will result in the same amount of features per week, just everyone does a little less and spends a little more time on communication.
Repeat up to thousands of developers where adding a single field takes months.
>At one point it was 35 engineers, but layoffs took it down to 7, at which point we started to get a lot more done.
Years ago I did two back to back contracts for two different pharmaceutical companies. They were both about the same size but one had an IT group that was ten times the size of the other. You can guess which project was late and painful.
At one point it was 35 engineers, but layoffs took it down to 7, at which point we started to get a lot more done. There was just so much less time spent keeping everyone aligned. So many fewer meetings, sign-offs, reviews, plannings, retrospectives, management meetings, etc. Developers had a lot more agency, so they just got stuff done. Technical debt repayment became 50% of our time, as we easily knocked out features in the other half of the time. We kept ruthlessly cutting complexity, so it got faster to add new features.
I'm sure some projects just need more bodies, but I think there's an upper bound to how much complexity can be added to a system in a given unit of time. Adding developers over a threshold will result in the same amount of features per week, just everyone does a little less and spends a little more time on communication.
Repeat up to thousands of developers where adding a single field takes months.