Yesterday I introduced the concept of diseconomies of scale. This raises the natural question: “What are some examples of things that suffer from diseconomies of scale?”

I’m sure there are countless, but here are a few I’ve been thinking about lately:

• Databases. Even the most scalable databases have limits, usually well under the order of hundreds of nodes. Many popular databases start to see diminishing returns where n > 1.
• Software development teams. Even the famous 2-pizza team is often considered too large.
• Monolithic code bases. These often turn into big balls of mud
• Microservice architectures. Come to think of it, microservices often aren’t much better.

What would you add to this list?