Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by zug_zug 1979 days ago
This is sort-of hand-wavey. The truth is there are many companies with order-of-magnitude too-many employees (and software eats them). And there's some that aren't.

There's no way to know which one uber is without exactly breaking down those numbers a bit more. But call me unconvinced for one.

1 comments

I don't have the experience to back my opinion, but my gut agrees.

Intuitively, it would seem to me that hiring past a certain threshold increases need to hire more engineers rather than quenching it — that is, the complexity resulting from changes made to the projects to keep such a high number of engineers productive approaches or even outstrips innate complexity and becomes unsustainable, demanding ever more engineers to keep it all afloat. Following this, a company that isn't keeping an eye out for net productive decreases as a result of hiring could end up with far more engineers than they actually need.

But I've always been an individual contributor, so my perspective may be limited.