As a first principle, you have to acknowledge that your time and energy are limited resources. Active collaboration (e.g. architecture reviews, code reviews, pairing) is strictly dependent on your time and energy. At a certain team size and development velocity, your capacity for active collaboration will be exhausted by total development output. The exact numbers will vary by organization, but I’d expect this effect to become visible at 5 engineers and well-established at 10. At this point, your value to the company reaches an inevitable threshold, bounded by an input constraint (your labor).
As they approach this threshold, talented engineers will often optimize their active collaboration. They'll move around the company and serve as core contributors on high-priority feature projects. This can be a viable approach to engineering career growth when a company's user and revenue growth is extremely rapid but at best can only establish a somewhat higher threshold. The labor constraint remains.
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