Well, you could outsource those, right? Like isn't this basically the point of services like Stripe Atlas or Pilot - that it should be easier to run a company o

Well, you could outsource those, right? Like isn't this basically the point of services like Stripe Atlas or Pilot - that it should be easier to run a company of 10, with almost all of those 10 people working on the actual product? In fact, outsourcing HR in particular is a well-established field - it's what companies like ADP do. Just like there's a happy ground between one massive monolith and multiple microservices per engineer, I think there's a happy ground between a 1200-person company and a bunch of sole proprietorships. It may not be 10; it might be 50. There are a huge number of <50-person companies in the world and they seem to be fine. In many cases, groups of these companies can execute faster than a 1200-person company can, because there's less internal hierarchy involved. (In much the same way that avoiding microservices doesn't mean you have no problems of interoperability, it just means they look different.)