Being “rockstars”: when software was a talents/creatives industry
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.<p>Almost the same specs, but the one in the startup had better scalability and fewer serious bugs...<p>So, spend 10-50x less and get higher quality?<p>Worst is I now consider case b) quite lean and efficient compared to what I see tech consultancies doing towards public sector, banks, etc...<p>--
My point being: There definitely IS a room for &quot;rockstars&quot; (don&#x27;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.<p>The problem with the model is the lack of predictability (what if the few developers you trust don&#x27;t deliver), the bus factor if one of the few devs quits, etc<p>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.