To me it seems crazy that a board would be getting their hands dirty on engineering "specifics". I would think you would have engineering level leadership making those calls and the board would either trust that person or should move on.

Anyway:

I will see that I always worry about super teams because super teams tend to get free rein, so of course they can be faster and more successful. But sometimes that's about the bureaucracy and not even the team members.

I've started projects with a team and due to time factors decided "I'll just take all of this." and it worked out great. That's not because I'm amazing... it's just the old adage about "What one programmer can do in one month, two programmers can do in two months".

Unfortunately, I've seen places where these super teams / people are setup and endlessly praised and it goes on and on and it becomes very clear it isn't them, it's the structure.

let me tell you a simple story

1. team A developed some really nice looking graphs from customer data we already collected

2. a member of team A pointed out he is colorblind and the palette did not work for him

3. product manager took the time to research this and figure out how we might make the palette configurable for those who are colorblind

4. CEO got wind of this and called everyone involved into a meeting. The decision of the CEO was no one would ever use colors for any data presentation. The only allowable color was a shade of gray

I'd like to point out that using only a shade of gray for "colors" effectively makes the entire planet colorblind

As someone who is colorblind I find shades of gray better than the colors I often see. OTOH, I can see most colors just fine, it is just that some colors most people think are very different look the same to me. There are a handful of people on earth who cannot see colors at all.

Yeah, I've been these "cool Skunkworks" teams and I literally made no more money, maybe got a $5k spot bonus (super rare), and burned myself out over a 6mo launch. Spent my entire thanksgiving week on-call putting out fires, literally every hour, while everyone else at the 800 person company was on vacation. Not a single executive or product manager involved in launching was there or checked in on things. Some moron (I hope he reads this, my nicks not anon) let us launch without connecting our credit card fraud system so we (ops, me) got slammed for an entire week with fraud server launches. Jason, you're a moron, and that's an understatement.

It's like being paid in exposure. We'll pay you in cool tech and learning!

Then you see the 20 go devs around you making the same money writing grpc services 8 hours a day home at 5 relaxing.

I'm not really sure how this relates. The story I was told had the guy working as the lead with several less experienced but still competent programmers for around 2 months. There was no crunch, burnout, or anything of the like.

You're being downvoted because most devs are blue collar and hate the idea of passionate talented devs doing something amazing quickly and effectively. Any anecdotes of small elite team success must be crushed.

If you are working more than 8 hours a day you have nobody to blame but yourself I think. Especially in a situation like that.