> Businesses should keep adding engineers to work on optimization until the cost of adding an engineering equals the revenue gain plus the cost savings at the m

> Businesses should keep adding engineers to work on optimization until the cost of adding an engineering equals the revenue gain plus the cost savings at the margin. This is often many more engineers than people realize. I think this is the key realization, and it's actually a variation on Conway's Law[0]. In a nutshell, some part of BigCorp discovers (or believes) that by hiring a software developer for $X, they can make $Y > $X in return. So they do. As long as some part of BigCorp is able to do that, you get more software engineers. This continues until you either (a) run out of budget, or (b) run out of opportunities. Because it's not done "top down", it less efficient than it could be to get all of the features in total. But due to how these engineers are funded internally, it's not possible to do the "top down" approach at all. And that's okay, all that really matters is that $Y > $X. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law "Organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations." In this case, it's not the communication structure that causes the perceived bloat, it's the funding mechanism. The basic idea that software organizations reflect some non-software, human structure in the business, holds.