Also due to wanting to keep your employees. You can't make the same amount of money year over year and retain employees who never get raises above CPI or promotions into management/ownership. That's just not going to work.
It's not hard to imagine a Google that had taken this path, just focused indefinitely on search & search ads, run itself with <1000 highly skilled, highly paid employees, and never done email, maps, docs, payments, mobile phones, video, or and any of the rest of it.
First Chrome, then Android were critical, life-or-death maneuvers for Google. Without paving their own path straight to users’ eyeballs, Google would have never survived. But succeeding in that path also required an entire ecosystem to back it up.
Google also does a lot of frivolous stuff to explore, but all of the major expansions are required just to protect their Search and Ad products.
Anyway, I'm not saying it's what they should have done. What they have done has obviously been wildly successful. But they could have done this and still given hundreds of people full-career employment and generational wealth.
Besides, junior developers / interns are supposed to do what exactly if there is no increasing revenue at a company and no one leaves above them? Just hang out until someone quits even though they're not going to?
Retraining a junior developer is costly. Advancing them is as well, but less costly than constantly cycling in new junior developers and interns to do the HTML/CSS + ETL script jobs no one likes doing.
Growth is natural and important towards keeping your staff happy and moving up.
Both Basecamp and Valve were growing massively, so I don't think those are good examples.
I'm not saying VC funding is a good thing; I largely think what we are seeing due to massive QE is malinvestment on a grand scale and is why you see dumb shit like Juicero.
But natural, bootstrapped growth is a good thing - and necessary, if you want to survive. Trending sideways is waiting for death on many fronts - your labor force being the largest one.
Besides, if you are paying a good wage, have a good work/life balance, a good environment and so on, people will be content and just work there. It's like farming or factory work - you're doing what you expect to be doing for the rest of your life, or at least the next 10-20 years.
How does this work when your competitor is offering half of compensation via RSUs skyrocketing in value?
>It's like farming or factory work - you're doing what you expect to be doing for the rest of your life, or at least the next 10-20 years.
This describes no one I know that earns a lot of income. I imagine a person that expects little change over 10 to 20 years will probably not be in position to grab opportunities when they present themselves.
I’d personally probably be happier in a small company than in one that is eternally chasing infinite growth (both in goals and in number of employees).
They largely abandoned dota 2, and CS is mostly plowing without any sign of major changes.
If steam were not this successful, it would have to hire more to grow revenue. It was just that steam as a platform is so efficient in utilizing manpower, it makes it less hungry on hiring.
Most organization aspiring growth has to find a way. It could be the market is growing, or better tech, or more employee, or more often, a mix of 2 or more of these or other unmentioned factors.