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I feel that way about making games. Imo the most efficient team size is 1. It will take longer, but it will take less man-hours and the product will be superior.

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I disagree. The amount of time it takes me to produce art at the level of polish required to suit the games I develop is far longer than it takes my artist friends to create better work. Same with music and just about everything else other than the design and (arguably) the programming. If I had the budget to hire one person for each major discipline, I would.

This sounds right. Many things require different talents, and the tasks can be divided so that people with different talents can focus on what they do best. If I were involved in a video game, I could be productive in programming, but definitely not in the artwork. Lots of tasks are like this.

However, there definitely is a real truth to the saying "too many chefs in the kitchen". You don't want to waste the chef's time with table service or janitorial duties, but you can't have 20 chefs all arguing about the menu or how to prepare food. The problem with too many companies, though, is they want the product done sooner, and think that adding more people will get it done faster, just like having 9 women will cause you to bring a baby to term in 1 month....

Yes, and I have experience working on very large development teams where it is clear diminishing returns. There's probably a critical pivot around 7 people (Dunbar's Number, right?) where you begin to have significant drag caused by the overhead of managing people and their resources in addition to creating a piece of software.

Of course, but it depends on the project and all the skills it entails. If it's a big, complex software project like a AAA game, you're going to need more than 7 people just for the programming work alone, and you can't expect them to also do the artwork, music, etc.; they'll probably do a lousy job of it. You can ask me to do artwork for a game, and you're going to wind up with something like stick figures; it simply isn't a strength I have. So more people may mean more difficulty with management, but if you don't do it, you just don't have a product.

But it does seem like some places are overstaffed and do that as a way to mask terrible management.

Bold claims.

>take less man-hours

Citation?

>the product will be superior

This is subjective. There are very good games to come out studios of 1-2 developers and studios of hundreds of developers.

I claim nothing, please see "Imo" above.

When you work by yourself: You never compromise. You dont need to spend time communicating with other members of the team. You dont have errors due to miscommunication. You dont have disagreements. Meetings to decide things happen in your head and take a few minutes instead of hours. You spend 0 time coordinating the team. Project/time management of the team becomes a triviality rather than a full-time managment job.

You also need to be a master at every piece of the puzzle, rather than being able to focus your efforts.

Even on teams people need to work outside their mastery. So, that's less of an issue than you might think.

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