One engineer on their own can only write so much code. As soon as you have two, you have a team, and the team needs to share information. Fundamentally that's what all those meetings are for (and it's a large part of the job of leadership to facilitate that sharing of information as effectively as possible)
> One engineer on their own can only write so much code.
My first internship, a long time ago, was making HTML websites manually. At the time JS was still young and was not widespread, but I still wrote a custom content management system that would write HTML for me... when I presented this to the people in charge, there was no interest. They didn't care I could do the work faster. They had clients, which payed them by job and not by time. This is just one example of many I experienced of how businesses are blind to how much programmers could add value to their company by simply optimizing their expertise of software engineering. Software engineers are boxed into roles where they are unable to focus on engineering only, and as a result they never achieve the technical level that will allow for domain specific innovations.
So no, engineers don't really have a limit on productivity (granted there is a cost), given that you can write code to write code. There really is no limit, we just have to look at AI.
