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I’d be careful not to conflate criticality with complexity.

The TCP/IP stack is extremely well defined and covers a finite problem space.

Products higher up the software stack tend to balloon in complexity as they reach into concrete use cases. I’m sure there are plenty of overweight teams, but most products can’t survive with 4-6 people.

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TCP/IP is so well defined because the engineers on these small teams are the ones publishing the standards. It isn't like they are simply reading a spec out of an existing document and coding up a conformant program.

> standards. It isn't like they are simply reading a spec out of an existing document and coding up a conformant program.

Err, yes - that’s what 98% of modern TCP/IP development work is. There aren’t frequent new RFCs for TCP - it is established, standardized, and stable.

The other 2% keeps engineers fairly busy, I imagine. Custom congestion control algorithms come to mind

Yeah, but even so, that pales in comparison to Joe Product Manager saying "the new French tax code dropped last Tuesday" or "our biggest competitors just signed an agreement that they will implemented a new standard they're proposing and we need to get onboard".

Non-technical stuff is crazy complex compared to purely technical stuff, which tends to be a lot better defined.

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