My favorite observation on this topic is that annual industry surveys (Stack Overflow survey, State of JS/CSS) consistently report around a quarter to a third o

My favorite observation on this topic is that annual industry surveys (Stack Overflow survey, State of JS/CSS) consistently report around a quarter to a third of respondents work in companies of 20 people or fewer. Companies that size I've worked at often had 2–5 technical staff total. That's where I've spent most of my career. It contrast, some people feel a project with 25 developers is best described as having "only" 25. And I know that's not the top of the scale. It's easy to imagine how many choices I'd make differently if I had too many people to reach organic consensus, or could count on a half-dozen team members leaving and getting replaced every year, or couldn't count on a certain baseline of skill or technical taste. This stuff doesn't really come up when we talk online. We just hand each other assertions without context - "K8s is overkill, you should use systemd on bare metal", or "your app will collapse if you use the DB as a queue", etc. I think the way we discuss our choices is worse for not clarifying our assumptions about the environment.