[majormajor]

> early employees falling upward.

This is what I've seen at places that just got to the 50+ dev mark. It can result in poorly planned junk systems being built and ill-prepared managers making simple mistakes (e.g. being "too nice" to properly manage poor performers or bad hires, or being so adverse to having to deal with that that the hiring process becomes overly selective so you're perpetually understaffed, or an unawareness of what to do around things like security and personal user data that it's not properly protected...).

[nickthemagicman]

50+ dev mark? Holy cow. That's like 5mil a year in dev salarys alone. That's a massive operation at that point.