> Hale's story misses that the slower pace at large organizations is less about the growing size of the team and more about the growing size and complexity of the codebase and the product.
In a Hale-like model, the growing size and complexity of the codebase and the product are communication and contention costs. Unless you wrote the entire codebase yourself (and probably even if you did), you are communicating and contending with the other authors of that codebase, using the codebase itself as a communication medium. Getting rid of other communication and contention costs provides a constant-factor improvement to a process that is still asymtotically quadratic. (Ie, O(a*N^2+b*N^2+...) is still O(N^2) as long as any of a, b, ... are nonzero.)