What does it mean to be overstaffed? I think that's a real question on which we can build. I define a skeleton crew as roughly 10% of the organization. If you

What does it mean to be overstaffed? I think that's a real question on which we can build. I define a skeleton crew as roughly 10% of the organization. If you cannot run your basic organization with just maintenance and basic bug fixes on 10% of your team, you have too much complexity in your system and you need to work to reduce your maintenance burden. If you need less than 10%, you have an well-architected system, or you have a very small system. Everything else in the system is research and development. These are new features that will drive revenue, or reduce non-engineering support costs, or otherwise drive new capabilities of the business. In that sense, every successful business is over-provisioned because they are all working on business bets for more revenue. So yes, every company can be leaner, but it will be at the expense of growth. Now, there are more subtitles in the article to address within that context. For example, it is also true that managers will keep an underperformer for longer so long as there is a net positive because they may be struggling to hire otherwise, or they may be bracing against future layoffs. (A lean, effective organization in an org that otherwise has game theory about layoffs knows that you keep people around that you're not afraid to lose. It's a terrible way to run an organization but it happens.) It is also true that we have work to do to level up the engineering management profession, as mentioned by the article. However, when discussing this, the key driver of employment growth is the pursuit of revenue growth and I think that's the primary lens and disconnect here.