Even when the overall company grows beyond the small group, the engineering team often pushes itself to stay unstructured. Hiring “full stack” engineers who are exclusively sourced from the professional and social networks of the current team results in low skill specialization and high homogeneity. Forcing the team to be collocated lowers communication barriers. And perhaps most critically, having an engineering team that operates solely as the execution arm of the product or founder makes the team highly task-oriented.
