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Comment by keeptrying | Hacker News Reader

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keeptrying

In most VC companies you'll be forced to hire fast as a way to show progress.

CEOs and even some CTOs don't understand how productivity can be lost by adding too many people too fast.

I've known of instances where managers have been pushed out because they didn't hire fast enough.

The amount of money wasted due to stupid things like this is incredible.

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You don't have to bend to every VCs demand. WhatsApp ran very lean and perhaps had 50 engineers tops. Every big tech company ran very lean until they hit scale Series D or so. So the headcount growth is not just a function of VC, but a function of people's desire to build empires. Even in many social gatherings managers boast of the number of engineers they are managing. So it's another flaunt metric for a bulk of founders and managers. Don't just blame the VCs.

Don't blame the VCs, blame the public. Extra headcount absolutely increases your perceived credibility at an IPO, so they are growing this metric.

In defense of the public, if 10 devs out of 30 decide to leave and open a competing business, you're screwed. If 10 out of 1000 do that, nobody will notice.

Well, usually it is the case that “key 10 employees leaving” has the similar effect for both examples

Even outside of VC companies. I worked briefly for a large, old tech giant you've heard of, and was told to hire two teams of contractors. I didn't have -work- for two teams of contractors; it was all green field development and I already had a team of devs champing at the bit for any requirement product (which was -extremely- slow) actually defined, and they were sitting idle half the time as it was, and I was basically told "the roadmap says we need these two extra teams starting in a month, so hire them". So I did, reiterating my caveats. Cue two months later when leadership was asking me why the contractors weren't doing anything; isn't there -something- they could be doing?

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