> Gitlab has 2,268 employees. That's probably an order-of-magnitude more than they need
The state of their long open issue tickets suggest otherwise.
The state of their long open issue tickets suggest otherwise.
We just delivered a one page form with 10-20 people in a month, and it was an almost impossible achievement.
So to be clear: If all of those were SWEs, that would be 2,268 people to introduce bugs, and roughly 2.5M potential social links / interactions (and communications overhead).
The issue queue is what results.
Most projects are best done by about 2-10 person teams. That's about where you can maintain architectural coherence. Beyond 20, architectural coherence becomes impossible.
I actually think most companies, particularly when VCs are pumping them full of capital, overhire.
I guess this is to signal to the market we're doing cool things...
There are very, very strong individual pressures to overhire. "I managed a 500-person team" sounds a lot better on a resume or otherwise than "I managed a 5-person team" (even if the 5-person team did more).
I also wouldn't go all cash. I'd do the normal $150-$200k cash, and the rest in equity. I'd be very, very generous with equity.
There are also time pressures, whereas many things take time to build. 5 people x 4 years >> 20 people x 1 year, at least if kept productive (which is sometimes hard with longer timelines)
I'm now thinking if elite companies ( no juniors , pay starts at 300k to 400k, no fluff) would generally out compete bigger organizations.
The fact there are 4 generations of job dependency tags alone must be a quagmire to modify.