Software Team Sizes

A small team of skilled engs hurts managers’ careers - they want large teams

You haven't said how big your team is.From my experience, if your team has more than 4-5 people, you're entering a territory where managing people is going to become a significant role itself and not something that can be done on a side as you do your regular engineering. Teams this big often tend to either not finish at all or break up into several smaller ones. It's much easier for smaller teams to cooperate efficiently.

I'd go by the Mythical Man Month. The communication overhead increases with more people vs the work getting done. That was my experience in my last company when we got acquired as our team sizes went from 5 to 15. In hindsight would have been better to split the teams to do different projects instead of one big project.

Maybe small teams can be faster than huge teams?

That sounds great when you have a small team, with 30+ devs it's hard to police.

This one size fits all approach is wrong. It is not about the size, but of quality. If you are able to hire all A-star employees then small size makes sense. But the reality is very different. You cannot get all A-star employees from the start, and you are also racing against time. So you try to balance between time, size and quality. If you are lucky, you will get second A-star senior engineer. Otherwise you have to hire two junior A-star engineers instead of one senior engineer both being ment

Why would this not work for a small team?

Seems about right. Software dev scales very poorly with number of devs. Optimum team size is like 3-4.

It sounds like you have a small or even solo team. That could play a big role.

I think it would depend a lot on the size of the company. In the article, they mention "Now repeat this for 50+ teams across the organization". At the company I work for, we only have about a dozen developers total. If they have more than 50 full teams, they're obviously operating on a completely different scale than we are.