Price's Law: a few people do most of the work

According to Price’s Law, in a team of nine, 3 people do 50% of the work and 6 do the other 50%.

Physicist Derk Price noticed that a small percentage of his peers were making most of the contributions to their field. From this he developed Price’s Law or Price’s Square Root Law: 50% of all work will be done by the square root of the total number of people who take part in the work. I have put this in a chart and then you see that the bigger the team, the smaller the minority that does 50% of the work, and the larger the majority that does the other 50%.

Now add to this that in software engineering you have diseconomies of scale, and then you get why it feels like your you slow down as you grow.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn