[grumple]

> Thanks to an incredible performance by our Talent Acquisition team, one of the best in the industry, we grew headcount 2.5x in about a year. But the problem is that growing the company 2.5x didn’t make us 2.5x more productive. It got harder to get things done because we didn’t add the right mix of skills and seniority levels to our team.

From The Mythical Man-Month: "If there are n workers on a project, there are (n^2 - n) / 2 interfaces across which there may be communication... The purpose of organization is to reduce the amount of of communication and coordination necessary". I doubt anybody would ever expect adding large numbers of employees to have a linear effect on productivity, especially if they aren't well coordinated. More people usually means more meetings and more communications costs, as well as more bureaucracy in the way. I find it hard to believe that a leader in software would expect otherwise.

[wolpoli]

Perhaps management sees tech work in the way they see assembly line workers - they believe that doubling the number of teams will double the ticket throughput.

[jcoder]

Yeah I read that part and immediately thought “tell me you’ve never read a single book on tech leadership without…”