Comment by lapcat

>> But the team was 5 to zero.

> The team you called pathological? Yeah, it was bad. Missing deadlines is bad. I don't understand where you're confused.

>> [just like 1 to 1 is bad...] Why?

> I already answered. Because of politics a project

I was confused because I thought you were trying to make general points, but apparently you're mired in the minute details of one company and its extremely specific projects and politics.

I'm getting the impression that there were so many idiosyncratic constraints on the project that it simply couldn't have gone any other way, and thus there's no real way to critically evaluate whether things would have gone better with a different arrangement. Be that as it may, I'm not sure what kind of general conclusion we're supposed to draw from such a constrained example? Going back to the linked article, the case of Tim didn't appear to be so constrained:

1) They were thinking of getting rid of Tim, which presumably wouldn't have killed the project entirely.

2) They expected Tim to make more individual contributions, which presumably wouldn't have killed the project entirely either.

3) The team already had a mix of junior and senior engineers, not simply Tim and a bunch of new grads.