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Comment by mikepurvis | Hacker News Reader

I don't know about that. There are plenty of examples of "boutique" companies who pay well and have insanely good retention over the long term— 37signals/basecamp as one example, at least until that dustup earlier this year. Valve is probably another.

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.

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That’s my dream too, but unfortunately the Google that took that path would have died long ago after being choked off by other large ecosystems from Microsoft, Apple, etc.

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.

But Google could also have licensed search technology to other companies interested in making the top-to-bottom ecosystem play. I mean, they even tried that, they were just trying to do it in a market that wasn't ready to take search seriously.

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.

It's not just engineers this applies to. Sure, if everyone makes $400k + benefits and profit share with good work-life balance and such, I guess that might fly. But most companies have customer support, IT, and other cost centers where you have entry-level employees who need to progress, and that necessarily means increasing wages over time to retain and advance good employees.

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.

Besides, you run the real existential risk of getting your margin cannibalized by another startup or Amazon if you don't grow enough. In a world where you pay everyone a lot of money, the product is awesome, and there's no growth, there's a lot of margin in your product that someone is going to target - some subset of customers you aren't serving, or customers who aren't that loyal and willing to switch for 20-50% lower costs.

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.

If your workforce is improving, you might have a kind of natural growth where they either deliver better products or more efficient services and you can acquire more customers (or charge more) without expanding your operations.

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.

> 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.

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 think they could have even done most of those things and remained small and lean. Most of the bloat isn't that they've entered these spaces, but that there are a million little sub-projects within each one chasing marginal (at best) improvements.

Didn’t Craigslist did basically that? I’m not familiar with recent developments but for decades they stayed small and focused and seemed to have done well.

Yes. They've stayed small and focused but while AFAIK they're still doing OK, the latest numbers I've seen on them listed about 50 employees. And I'm willing to bet most of them aren't unusually well compensated. I'm also not sure when I last heard Craigslist come up in conversation although I expect especially people in urban areas still use them for classified advertising.

Yeah, that was my point - they chose to stay small (this is both in focus of the company as well as number of employees).

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).

I worked for a very small company for a number of years and it was a pretty good run for the most part. That said, I'm in a significantly better place financially having worked for a reasonably big public company for about the past decade.

And after whoever started the project gets their promotion, the product will be killed off and Google will chase another shiny thing. How much does anyone trust totally new Google things these days?

Valve doesn’t have as many employees but they definitely grow in both revenue and product line (vr, deck, they had other hardware products before - steam itself was a “side project” to distribute half life 2!)

Everyone knows that valve mostly care about steam nowadays, and at most one other core gaming product.

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.

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