Not to be obtuse, or maybe miss the joke, but how can you sometimes have a little less than 1 person working on one of the most important parts of your runtime?
"Full-time equivalent (FTE) is a way to measure a worker's involvement in a project, or a student's enrollment at an educational institution. An FTE of 1.0 means that the person is equivalent to a full-time worker, while an FTE of 0.5 signals that the worker is only half-time. Typically, different scales are used to calibrate this number, depending on the type of institution (schools, industry, research) and scope of the report (personnel cost, productivity)."
how can you sometimes have a little less than 1 person working on one of the most important parts of your runtime?
You make sure that person knows a lot about garbage collectors? If he's implemented garbage collectors before and is up-to-date on GC research, there's no reason one person couldn't implement it alone.
Sounds like a bug more than a feature to me. :)