I'm not sure of your first point. The organizations i'm talking about are clearly agglomerations of teams anyway. Nobody has a flat 8000 person team structure

I'm not sure of your first point. The organizations i'm talking about are clearly agglomerations of teams anyway. Nobody has a flat 8000 person team structure i'm aware of :) Also, the fraction is not the problem, it's certainly the same. But the absolute scale of the number matters at some point. 0.001 people a year of lost dev time is not likely to change what your company could accomplish. 200 is. (I think you don't disagree, but i can't really tell, so if you do, let me know and happy to argue about it further :P)