Comment by dpark
5 hours ago
> using an aphorism to make a point.
But your “aphorism” is not true. You made a claim that more developers make a project slower. And you pointed to TMMM in support of that claim.
Now you seem to be saying “I know this isn’t really true, but my point hinges on us pretending it is.”
> Let’s imagine we’re going to make a new operating system to compete with Linux.
This is a nonsensical question. “Would you rather be set up to fail with 10 engineers or 1000”? Your proposed scenario is that it’s not possible to succeed there is no choice to be made on technical merit.
> But which team should ship first? And keep shipping and release fastest?
Assuming you are referring to shipping after that initial month where we have failed, the clear option is the largest of the teams. A team of 10 will never replicate the Linux kernel in their lifetimes. The Linux kernel has something like 5000 active contributors.
> I’ve heard stories that it takes a long time to get small changes to production.
There are many reasons it’s slow to ship changes in a company like Google. This doesn’t change the fact that no one is building Chrome or Android with a team of ten.
You’re right, I’m not making my point well.
You do need enough people to make complex systems. We can do more together than we can on our own. Linux started out with a small team but it is large today.
It runs against my experience though and I can’t seem to explain why.
My observation in my original post is that I don’t see why writing code is the bottleneck. It can be when you have too much of it but I find all the ancillary things around shipping code takes more time and effort.
Thanks for the discussion!
> It runs against my experience though and I can’t seem to explain why.
Your experiences are probably correct, but incomplete. More engineers on a project do come with more cost. Spinning up a new engineer is a net loss for some time (making the late project later) and output per engineer added (even after ramp up) is not linear. 5000 engineers working on Linux do not produce 5000x as much as Torvalds by himself. But they probably do produce more than 2500 engineers.
> Thanks for the discussion!
You too