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Does this strategy work?

I mean, has it worked before? Can you hire thousands of technical people, throw them at some hard problem and expect they will solve it?




The Idea Factory is a history of Bell Labs about just that idea, starting with the first transcontinental telegraph message.


Having worked at Microsoft I see how this usually plays out. Lots of teams and people added for the sake of having people. 9 women can't make a baby in a month. Microsoft has a ton of money in the bank and they need to spend it, make acquisitions and see where it sticks.

Some of the best work at MS I have seen weirdly had been in small teams with razor focus. Typescript, Vscode.


Your last samples represent an overinvestment into a mid-term dead-end though (JS).


Manhattan Project, Apollo.


Exactly the two ones that I had thought of but... there are big differences. The goals were well defined, the means were known and there was managers and planifications.


I've always found that more people doesn't necessarily mean more/better output...




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