Oh god, this reminds me of a company I left where management would regularly talk about &quot;swarming&quot; a problem. They&#x27;d form these temporary &quot;feature teams&quot;, where they&#x27;d assign more programmers than were needed to a problem, while other important concerns were left abandoned. From a management optics standpoint, it let them tell the executives &quot;Look how serious we are about this feature!&quot; From a practical standpoint it was pretty much a disaster. You would end up with one person actually qualified to do the work being dragged in five directions by trying to manage five other people who were well meaning, but had no idea what to do. It ended up with one or two people being stressed out and overworked, and the rest of the team being mostly idle.<p>I know this isn&#x27;t exactly the same thing, and I try to keep an open mind on these things, but you could just as easily call this &quot;programming by committee&quot;. We all know how great anything described by &quot;X by committee&quot; turns out.<p>There&#x27;s nothing wrong with gathering a few people together to work on a thorny problem, but that sort of gathering has to happen organically. When people trying to sell management books turn this sort of thing into a buzzword, it just ends up being cluelessly applied by some starry eyed junior manager that has found a shiny new hammer and the world looks like nails to him.