In my career I have seen almost identical systems being built by a) 6 developers in a startup in 1 year b) 100+ developers in a big company with a much much larger budget in 2 years.
Almost the same specs, but the one in the startup had better scalability and fewer serious bugs...
So, spend 10-50x less and get higher quality?
Worst is I now consider case b) quite lean and efficient compared to what I see tech consultancies doing towards public sector, banks, etc...
--
My point being: There definitely IS a room for "rockstars" (don't like that term, but interpret this as developers competent enough to carry a lot of weight on their own and work in a smaller company) to deliver a lot of value.
The problem with the model is the lack of predictability (what if the few developers you trust don't deliver), the bus factor if one of the few devs quits, etc
In a sense inefficiency is a goal, because otherwise you loose redundancy. It costs a lot to hire 100 to produce the output of 10, but much lower risk.
Almost the same specs, but the one in the startup had better scalability and fewer serious bugs...
So, spend 10-50x less and get higher quality?
Worst is I now consider case b) quite lean and efficient compared to what I see tech consultancies doing towards public sector, banks, etc...
-- My point being: There definitely IS a room for "rockstars" (don't like that term, but interpret this as developers competent enough to carry a lot of weight on their own and work in a smaller company) to deliver a lot of value.
The problem with the model is the lack of predictability (what if the few developers you trust don't deliver), the bus factor if one of the few devs quits, etc
In a sense inefficiency is a goal, because otherwise you loose redundancy. It costs a lot to hire 100 to produce the output of 10, but much lower risk.