This might all be pedantic, but in this vein: one draft horse can pull 8,000 pounds, while two horses together can pull 24,000 pounds [1], even more if the hors

This might all be pedantic, but in this vein: one draft horse can pull 8,000 pounds, while two horses together can pull 24,000 pounds [1], even more if the horses have worked together. Horses do not become exponentially more powerful as you add additional horses. Similarly, if you had me make something by myself I could do some work, but if you had me make something partnering with someone with complementary skills (for me a good frontend designer) then the result would be more than 2x what I would do alone. This also does not scale... you can't add a chef and an ops person and a ballet dancer and a plumber to the team and keep getting better results. But maybe you add a whole ops team, and now I can do work and almost forget about that task, and the work is more effective and our little team stays little and the big ops team is professional and reliable so that once something is up it is up. Can whole teams complement each other? So you get all matrixed [2] and that's good and bad, but you can only have so many of these groups. Maybe you go long and blow everything up into microservices [3], but it can't go forever. Can whole business units become complementary? Or are there other ways to break it up? I haven't read the article so I'm not sure if it answers this ;) But from skimming it, it seems Malthusian in its perspective, hell-is-other-people, that scaling up is unfortunate instead of a process of becoming something new. [1] https://timmaurer.com/2012/01/16/horse-sense/ https://timmaurer.com/2012/01/16/horse-sense/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_management [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ