Interesting comment from a software developer:

"I spent a full year working on a feature which should've been designed, implemented and tested in a week" (...) "By the way "feature" is much too strong a word; a better description would be "menu". Really."

(...)

So that nets us a conservative estimate of 24 people involved in this feature. Also each team of 8 was separated by 6 layers of management from the leads, so let's add them in too, giving us 24 + (6 * 3) + 1 (the shared manager) 43 total people with a voice in this feature. Twenty-four of them were connected sorta closely to the code, and of those twenty four there were exactly zero with final say in how the feature worked. Somewhere in those other 17 was somebody who did have final say but who that was I have no idea since when I left the team -- after a year -- there was still no decision about exactly how this feature would work."

Via Joel Spolsky.