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Comment by elif | Hacker News Reader

When we were a flat engineering team, profit-sharing and growing it was an amazing place to work because everyone was very good at their job and cared about making a lean and self-sufficient profit machine.

From 2015 on the corporatization took over, the flat hierarchy was completely discarded in favor of multi-tier CwhateverO monster departments, team fragmentation and purposeful reassignments, and basically a 100% annual employee count growth mandate.

That's also around when the big raises and bonuses stopped, and everyone was assigned to a role and level which has a set salary value range etc.

For me 2018 was the end of my patience for it, but I think some are trapped believing in an older version of themselves.

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To be fair, much of what you describe is just part of becoming a mature company. At some point, flat can't work anymore. At some point, the impact of individuals is diluted and the number of people needed is so high, that outsize rewards become impossible or risk being sure signs of inequality.

As much as I appreciate equality goals (what role, level, value ranges are there for), and believe their benefits outweigh their costs, they function by lowering ceilings and lifting floors. The only way to earn outsize bonuses these days is to be directly tied to outsize earnings (e.g. commissions), and that's hard to do with engineers.

The engineers route to that kind of risk/reward dynamic is by founding / joining something early (that actually grants options) and trying to make it huge.

"mature" is the wrong word here. We were "mature" for a decade before this expansion. We had no debt, big profit margins, and our customers loved us so much we didn't need advertising to have exponential growth.

Our decision to "grow up" was more a decision to try addressing non-email markets, and hire so many people and buy so much real estate that profit then depended on that choice.

Now they have half the talented staff because of boneheaded management decisions, half the loyal customers because the team stopped being able to address their needs, etc. If that's "mature" to bankers or VC's then I'd call them over-mature.

That’s fair, but you have to recognize that couldn’t have lasted forever. Your space was on its way to heavy commoditization, like software spaces almost always are.

Ignoring the shifting sands would’ve likely meant a more gradual decline, instead of an unpleasant growth, and would’ve almost certainly yielded less than the chosen path.

The talented people and half the customers would’ve likely bailed either way.

You sound right.

And that makes it even more depressing.

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