If your team is 5 people, and each one makes the company 4% better every year, then after a year the company is 3.3x better, and after 5 it's 403x better. If yo

If your team is 5 people, and each one makes the company 4% better every year, then after a year the company is 3.3x better, and after 5 it's 403x better. If you team is 5 people, but one of them makes other engineers 4% better each year, and the rest focus on the company, then after a year the company is 3.2x larger and after 5 it's 392x better. Wasn't worth it. At six engineers the balance slightly shifts. Group 1 year 5 years Gain 5 product 3.3 403.4 1 tools, 4 product 3.2 392.8 -2.6% 6 product 3.5 492.7 1 tools, 5 product 3.3 501.0 +1.7% Now, obviously the team probably won't stay 5 engineers for 5 years, but my point is: like everything else, this is a cost-benefit analysis. For small teams, it turns out it's not worth it to have happy Fred on your team, and you should let him go work on internal tools for a few dozen engineers where he can have massive impact there.