Someone read the mythical man-month and realized that more engineers doesn't make things faster, and can actually make things slower.

The next logical step is to hire fire people until you reach the optimal number, in some kind of binary search approach.

To some degree that’s true. Less engineers definitely can speed things up if they get autonomy.

At my company there are a lot of people talking about work, doing planning, scheduling and whatever. They don’t contribute much but also hold the engineers up with constant information requests.

Made me chuckle