Comment by jodacola | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jodacola | Hacker News Reader

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I hear you, and appreciate the response. The bias of my experience tells me that the "what if" factor can be created by a single person experimenting. When the thing that one person created takes off, awesome - hire some more folks to support and grow it. New revenue stream. More ownership by the person who created it. Give folks the time to experiment.

Hiring more people than necessary is, in my mind, akin to gambling. I, personally, hate gambling, and that's probably where my bias comes in on this topic.

Tying it back to my original response: when I say reasonable team size, my implication is reasonable growth based on real results, not just rolling the dice.

To turn the perspective from an engineering leader to that of an engineer (the other half of my career), if I could practice and LeetCode my way into a FAANG and make more than I've ever made to be part of the headcount machine, why would I stretch and innovate? I'd just sit back, do what's expected, and collect.

It's a weird dichotomy, and I fully appreciate that I'm biased in my perspective, which may be detached from reality.

And, again, in the imaginary world where I'm an investor, why would I want a large team built of folks just looking to collect a huge paycheck by being part of the machine?

I found an inverse correlation between effort I put in and rewards. The more I coasted, the safer I was politically and the better the salaries.

It’s bizarre.

I can tell you have decade(s) more experience than me in life and the software field in general. So my perspective may be different, limited and different in some ways.

But really different people think differently. Investors are looking at it differently, they're willing and eager to gamble. VC basically gamble for 1 hit out of a 100 bets. But that 1 bet will double or triple their money, then its worth it for them even if they have to write off 100 million in failed bets -- there's probably tax benefits doing this.

I found out about this at one point. I asked a founder, "so investors are just gonna let the company go under? They're willing to write off 5 million in the funding they gave your company?" It was such a irrational thing to me. But looking back, it's not irrational from the VCs point of view.

I agree with you. Some things make no sense as you point out in your comment.

But the people are complex and often irrational, at least from an outside perspective. Imagine aliens observing us, what would they think about how we live and operate.

Reminds me of a Silicon Valley quote -- what a show, it's remarkable how much it accurately depicts the industry

> You're one of Peter's compression plays, huh? Uhh, one of? How many does he have? Not too many. Like six or eight. Ok. Why are there so many? You know how sea turtles have a shit-ton of babies because most of them die on their way down to the water? Peter just wants to make sure that his money makes it to the ocean.

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