One person teams are only best when it comes to coordination overhead. they have obvious deficiencies in terms of "bus factor". If the one person in the team le

One person teams are only best when it comes to coordination overhead. they have obvious deficiencies in terms of "bus factor". If the one person in the team leaves the company, gets ill, dies or takes a vacation, work will have to be transferred to someone else (in which case the coordination overhead returns) or the work has to stop (which is not always feasible). A lot of the inefficiencies of bigger companies come from the redundant people needed to fill out the bus factor. Having a DBA on hand for emergencies might be overkill for a startup, but when you have revenue of 100 million per day depending on the database always being up it is much cheaper to have a spare person sitting around (even if they're not doing much most of the time).