I strongly suspect the mathematical formula suggesting that 10,000 engineers could be as productive as 45,000 with the right support is a case of "in theory, but not reality."
When tree farming was invented, the initial crop was wonderful, but they soon had to come up with a term meaning "forest death" for the sickly, underdeveloped trees that followed. A monoculture of the same plants quickly strips the soil of essential nutrients and if you cannot identify those nutrients and aggressively resupply them, you will soon find that the trees you wanted to grow and harvest will no longer thrive and somnetimes will no longer survive. A forest can produce healthy trees for generations because of the diversity of plants growing therein. Different plants use different nutrients and some replenish the nutrients used by neighboring plants.
Obviously, software tools are not plants. But I have my suspicions that the diversity of code he describes developed in part for reasons like "different engineers happened to be experienced with different languages, tools, etc" but there may be cases in there where it developed that way because it was the best way to handle it. So when you start standardizing things, you may be killing off things that are critical to the health of the codebase and the company.
I can see value in having someone dedicated to serving the needs of the engineers so they can be more productive. I can see a need to clean things up. But complexity itself often has inherent value that cannot be replaced or improved upon with a simpler solution. Sometimes, simplifying things amounts to throwing the baby out with the bath water. I hope they don't wind up doing that.
When tree farming was invented, the initial crop was wonderful, but they soon had to come up with a term meaning "forest death" for the sickly, underdeveloped trees that followed. A monoculture of the same plants quickly strips the soil of essential nutrients and if you cannot identify those nutrients and aggressively resupply them, you will soon find that the trees you wanted to grow and harvest will no longer thrive and somnetimes will no longer survive. A forest can produce healthy trees for generations because of the diversity of plants growing therein. Different plants use different nutrients and some replenish the nutrients used by neighboring plants.
Obviously, software tools are not plants. But I have my suspicions that the diversity of code he describes developed in part for reasons like "different engineers happened to be experienced with different languages, tools, etc" but there may be cases in there where it developed that way because it was the best way to handle it. So when you start standardizing things, you may be killing off things that are critical to the health of the codebase and the company.
I can see value in having someone dedicated to serving the needs of the engineers so they can be more productive. I can see a need to clean things up. But complexity itself often has inherent value that cannot be replaced or improved upon with a simpler solution. Sometimes, simplifying things amounts to throwing the baby out with the bath water. I hope they don't wind up doing that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_dieback