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Comment by mrkurt | Hacker News Reader

Number of employees isn't a key metric of growth for any startup. It _is_ a way to try and drive growth, though. So when VCs want companies to hire, what they're really asking for is companies to put the money to work to make it grow faster.

Some companies just can't grow even while hiring a ton of people.

And to answer your question, the 900 people at twitter are doing sales, community work, support, etc, etc. That stuff balloons fast.

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Hiring as an attempt to drive "real" growth (revenue/market share) I can understand but my argument is that the marginal gain of every new employee seems to drop off quickly. I can understand hiring more sales reps if that's the bottleneck in getting new customers or more support staff if that'll improve customer retainment. I just don't support hiring 20 more project managers because that's what someone feels like the company should have at this stage.

Yes, I think what you're witnessing is badly managed companies, or companies that don't have much of a future. I'm fairly sure no VC on earth would recommend hiring 20 more project managers.

I agree, but I also think that if your product isn't where the VC thinks it needs to be, and you've got plenty of money in the bank, that VC isn't going to tell you to take all the time you need: they are going to tell you to focus on hiring great people so you can build faster.

"You need to hire more/better people" is just the standard response to almost any problem.

How else could you put invested money to work in a company with no assets except to spend it on advertising though?

That's the VC game. Those funds aren't giving you millions of dollars to keep in the bank. You grow (by spending it) or die.

Brooks' Law comes to mind, nine women making a baby in one month and all that.

The way to do it is "3 people making a baby, 3 people building a nursery, 3 people promoting the baby shower". Not all companies can do this, or are managed well enough to pull it off, but it's not an insane thing to try once you've already decided to get on the VC gravy train.

What's the 3rd person's responsibility in making the baby?

In my experience, babies are best made with a life coach present.

[From] "the same couple as is best known through the biographical 1950 film and book Cheaper by the Dozen."

[Time and Motion Study..]

.. is a major part of scientific management"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_motion_study

See Matrix Management, for reporting :

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_management

It's obvious that the task has to be able to be subdivided suitably, but not enough is said about Matrix Management, especially when the cost of parallel business development is considered, in seeking increasing speed of execution.

I've seen it pointed out that it's an odd choice to use the most well-known example of parallel work in the world as an icon of non-parallelizable work.

Population size responds to circumstances almost immediately because birth is so well parallelized. You can have any number of women produce one baby each all in the same 40-week period. If you put any significant number of women on the problem, you'll get noticeably more than one baby each. And you can increase the litter size pretty dramatically beyond that -- how many months did it take Octomom to produce one baby?

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