But the untold story isn’t about efficiency, it’s about negative returns to engagement. One person on a project is personally responsible. Two people might manage to coordinate. Beyond that, you’re in the endless hellscape of team projects.
Remember the last time you were assigned partners in school? A team project is a game of chicken. Each participant signals their willingness to fail through procrastination, until finally at the last minute someone defects and does all the work. The more you care, the more you lose.
Have you ever wondered why you spend so much time writing design docs and detailed PRs? Or why you’re constantly stuck in meetings explaining what you do to various groups of people? Or why your project has a separate engineer, EM, PM, Designer and Tech Lead? Maybe these are best practices, maybe we’ve all settled on the right way of doing things.
But they’re also ways of making sure that if you get hit by a bus, no one has to care
So this ends up being a vicious cycle where higher churn forces a higher Bus Factor, which causes alienation, which increases churn, and so on until you either die or become Oracle.
If you hear that employees are overworked and underpaid, don’t cry abuse, ask how they’re getting compensated instead
Second, you don’t own the means of production. Your skills are only worth millions of dollars in the particular context of this company. You can’t walk away and produce that value on your own. You depend on the company much more than it depends on you.