I've been in teams where they chose to fire half the people and productivity actually went up. It's not as simple as "manpower". More people mean more overhead

I've been in teams where they chose to fire half the people and productivity actually went up. It's not as simple as "manpower". More people mean more overhead. More meetings. More documentation. The code is structured in more modular ways, and you end up wrapping anti-corruption layers around more things. When there's too much communication going on, Partnership relationships take way too much overhead. So people switch to Conformist relationships, which means you can still spend half your day coding, but every now and then you spend time redoing something that nobody brought up or thought over properly. This kind of mess is also where the low performers thrive like mushrooms. They're happy to overcommunicate and overengineer, because it covers for slow performance. So when these people get fired, it's actually good for morale. Was hiring done poorly? Yes, every company hires poorly, and startups rarely have the luxury to afford A-listers.