Interesting observation about Swedes. I'm Dutch, and I've noticed Swedes and Dutch people and culture are very similar in many ways, very egalitarian and everything, but the Dutch are not hampered by politeness. And our brutal honesty might help keeping standups efficient.

I've been part of several "too large" teams, and one in particular, with 20 people, I was really surprised it worked so well. Standup would take 20 minutes, everybody paid attention. There were informal subteams that would discuss details outside the standup.

The most official subteam was the testers (first 2, later 4) who also controlled deployment, because everything had to go through them.

Somehow it was a very efficient chaos. Not scrummy at all; technically we had sprints, but everybody ignored them and it was more kanban. Some features would take months, others would be done quickly. Some would restructure much of the code base. I've seen PRs that touched hundreds of files. Somehow it all worked and it worked very efficiently. We even took over another project from a team in the US that was going nowhere, and we managed to deliver it within their original deadline despite the other team wasting a year doing nothing.

I still wonder how that team could work so well. We weren't all generalists; I was, but others would do only fronted, only backend, or spend most of their time thinking about taxonomies. The team did seem to foster a culture of friendly but brutal honesty without any punching down. Main tester and main backender would rib each other a lot. People eagerly took responsibility for fuckups. Everybody was considered an expert on something and nobody knew everything, so we'd consult each other a lot.

> but the Dutch are not hampered by politeness. And our brutal honesty might help keeping standups efficient.

Anecdotes are fragile; I've had the exact opposite experience, Dutch people taking offense for being direct when reviewing code.