Business
Headcount as a Substitute for Architecture
Throwing more engineers at the problem is a well-known anti-pattern disguised as a solution. When leadership responds to slow delivery by adding headcount, it is saying the architecture is fine and the people are the bottleneck. The engineers know that is not true.
You can staff a tangled system with a hundred engineers and you will get a hundred engineers in meetings, stepping on each other. The mark of a mediocre manager is reaching for headcount. The mark of a leader is reaching for the interface. Headcount is not a substitute for the extra architecture cost the report prints as sync tax.