
Why Software Development Gets Harder in Teams
The Hidden Human Patterns That Slow Down Great Teams
It usually goes like this: a few engineers gathered around a messy whiteboard (or a Miro board nowadays), coding, joking, sharing watchlists and playlists, and jumping from debugging to meme-sharing. Features ship quickly. Each merged PR nudges the project forward. Sometimes smoothly, sometimes with bumps, but manageable.
Then the team grows. Names stack up at daily standup. Meetings are getting longer. Decisions start to echo. Somewhere along the way, the vibe changes.
No one ever says, “We’re losing it.” But you feel it. Threads multiply, decisions stall, reviews drag, and small changes become negotiations.
I’ve lived through this too many times. Sometimes as an outsider looking in, sometimes as the one called in to fix the mess. I’m no saint here. Looking back, I’ve been part of the problem myself. And every single time, it’s the same familiar pattern that emerges.
We like to think bigger teams mean bigger progress. But the math breaks down. The energy fades, and then the work gets heavier.
Why do teams that start with promise so often wind up stuck in slow churn? Why does adding talent so often subtract clarity, trust, and pride in the work?
The hardest problems aren’t in the codebase. They hide in what goes unspoken: missed glances, uncertain pauses, and the questions nobody wants to ask first.
I wish these moments were rare.
They aren’t.
Dominance Disorders
Sometimes, a strong voice saves the day. When everything’s on fire and the team needs a decision, the loudest or most senior often steps in, points the way, and, at least for a while, brings relief.
But what saves you in a storm can choke you in calm weather.
Every team starts out open, balanced, like a grove of young trees, light and air flowing freely between. But give one trunk too much space, and its branches soon crowd out the rest. The team bends toward a single shape until new growth struggles to break through.
I’ve seen this happen over and over. There is always a senior developer who corrects every proposal, a manager who narrates every meeting, or an architect whose word becomes law, whether spoken or not. Sometimes, dominance is quiet; sometimes, it’s relentless.
The effect is the same.
We like to think that leadership is earned, that the best ideas win. But in practice, teams drift toward the familiar comfort of hierarchy. When a “hero” handles every hard decision, it’s tempting to follow.
Why do we fall into this pattern? Sometimes it’s hope. We hope that someone knows the way. Sometimes, it’s fear: the risk of being wrong, of seeming ignorant, of being left behind. Status, once ceded, is hard to reclaim.
The cost is subtle at first. Quieter engineers stop raising objections. The bus factor shrinks. Code becomes the work of one mind, maintained by many, understood by few.
Over time, the strongest branch isn’t just holding up the team.
It’s stealing the sun.
Speed Traps
There’s a reason so many teams get hooked on speed. Sometimes, shipping fast is the only way to win the next contract, keep a restless client, or even keep the company afloat. The rush isn’t always foolish; sometimes it feels like survival.
In my early days, I worked on a project where the internal motto was, “Ship by Friday or be forgotten by Monday.” So we shipped. The demo wowed the client, but what followed were two brutal months of patching, rewriting, and long weekends. The shortcuts bought us time, but at a steep price.
Moving fast in software is a sugar high. It feels incredible. Features roll out, the board is happy, and the team gets to play hero for a day. The crash always follows. Untested code piles up. Bugs slip into production. What was meant to be a sprint turns into a series of all-nighters and quiet regrets.
The hardest part is that once you’re in the cycle, it feels impossible to slow down. Stakeholders expect miracles. Engineers get used to firefighting. “We’ll fix it after launch” becomes a running joke that nobody laughs at.
The lesson always comes late. Usually it arrives after a spectacular bug or an 11:30 PM rollback. By then, the sugar rush has faded, and all that remains is the headache.
Fake Harmony
I once sat through a retro the week after a release blew up in production. The room was all smiles. “Great effort, everyone,” someone said. Nobody mentioned the fire drill, the missed test, or the sleepless night.
The silence was louder than any critique.
The urge to keep the peace is strong. It’s human. Most of us would rather bite our tongues than risk tension. That is how fake harmony takes root. We swap candor for comfort and feedback for compliments. Kim Scott, the author of Radical Candor—a great book about giving fearless feedback with genuine care—calls this “ruinous empathy,” caring so much about sparing feelings that we end up hurting the team and the product.
There’s comfort in agreement, but comfort rarely breeds progress. A team that avoids hard conversations is not avoiding pain.
They are just saving it for later, with interest.
Why do we do it? Sometimes it’s fear: fear of being labeled negative, fear of losing a promotion, fear of standing out for the wrong reasons. Sometimes it’s habit. In places where the culture rewards optimism, the truth can start to feel like a risk.
But the data is clear. Google’s Project Aristotle found the highest-performing teams are not the ones that play nice. They are the ones where people feel safe enough to speak hard truths. Psychological safety means you can call out the flaw before it ships, admit the deadline’s impossible, or say, “We need to change course.”
Harmony is not about everyone smiling. It is about earning the right to be honest and trusting your team to handle it.
Structural Landmines
Structural risks rarely show up on a roadmap, but they derail teams all the same. Monoculture looks efficient. Plant a field with a single crop, and everything grows in neat rows. When the blight comes, suddenly the whole harvest is at risk. When every engineer shares the same background, perspective, or habits, the team misses warning signs that fresh eyes would have caught.
Agreement is easy, but so is tunnel vision.
Hero worship creates a different kind of risk. Dominance disorders involve hierarchy and voice; hero worship involves dependence and expertise. I once watched a team lose an entire month when their “indispensable” lead burned out mid-crunch. Nobody else could untangle his code. He had become the single point of failure (not just dominating discussions but also controlling knowledge). Every decision, every bug, and every design choice funneled through him. When he left, progress stopped cold. The same pattern appears when knowledge is hoarded instead of shared. The bus factor drops to one, and everyone pretends it’s normal.
Then there’s technical debt, the monster under the floorboards. Most teams know it’s there. Leadership rarely carves out space to pay it down. Why would they? Business incentives reward shipped features, not the slow, invisible work of cleanup. The true cost stays hidden for months, sometimes years, until velocity stalls and deadlines slip. By then, it’s too late. The team is stuck patching holes in a foundation nobody wants to inspect.
These landmines are not accidental. They are the product of incentives that value comfort, speed, and heroics over resilience and shared responsibility. This explains why the same problems keep resurfacing: engineers are burned out, documentation is ignored, knowledge is siloed, and the whole team is one step away from chaos.
The scariest risks are the ones you learn to ignore. They come crashing through the floor.
Closing Reflection
In software, the hardest bugs rarely live in code. They hide in habits, in power, in everything we don’t say out loud.
The tools will change. The languages will change. Yet these human problems, like ego, silence, and misplaced speed, stay uncannily familiar.
Software is built in code but survives in trust.
Every team carries a hidden backlog. The technical stories get logged and tracked. The human ones, such as resentment, fatigue, and lost candor, hide in plain sight and are harder to resolve.
What if the real mark of a great team is not just shipping but learning to talk about what hurts before the system breaks?
Maybe perfection is a myth. Teams that surface the invisible stories, including fears, doubts, and disagreements, find ways to recover faster, build better, and lose fewer good people to burnout or boredom.