You can put 100 developers on a task that could be done with 10 but that does not necessarily mean you get 10 times the output nor 10 times quicker delivery. More often than not, productivity per person decreases as a team grows - too many cooks spoil the broth.
To be fair, this point is true, there are diminishing returns as you add more people to a project. It's the "too many cooks spoil the soup" effect.
However, Fdev's problems has very little to do with the number of actual developers, but management that micromanages, has a cumbersome hierarchy, is slow and rigid to accepting change, if any change is at all approved.
According to the glassdoor reviews, most rank and file have zero say in scheduling or prioritization, combined with the fact the pay doesn't seem to keep up with the cost of living in Cambridge making housing choices difficult, requiring employees to live far away from work to be able to afford it.
Fdev needs to start allowing remote working, and/or either create suboffices in areas of lower cost of cost of living so the pay will stretch farther or leave Cambridge entirely. That and give people some desperately needed raises. Another possible solution to the housing issue is Fdev should invest in some company housing nearby.
The "loss of passion" I've read being experienced by the devs of Fdev are because they do not feel valued as employees because of this, which makes them not want to put in all of their effort. To quote Peter Gibbons from Office Space "It makes people want to do
just enough work to keep from being fired"
But sadly, these would have all been ideas that would have been easier to implement BEFORE Fdev took a $400 million dollar shortfall. I bet the investors are
real happy about that, eh
@David Braben ?
