[xinu2020]

I was working for a fintech company that experienced a large growth (in the number of employees). The leadership team was keen to "grow fast" and on the surface it looked good: investors where happy, the company had a not so high yet but steady income (subscription-based) and each team seemed to have a purpose.

But in reality there were many issues: - there was a culture of launching "project/initiative" to justify more hires and promotions, rather than improving on the key issues we had (that nobody wanted to tackle). - People were often switching team after a promotion, for example leading a new team, and leaving their problems behind. - On the technical-side it was extremely tedious to contribute, we started with a monolith, then moved a micro-service architecture (with k8s, kafka etc). There was a push to do things properly, but it translated in over-engineering parts (for the cool stuff) while the valuable not-so-cool stuff was left to rot. At the end we had to maintain multiple things and the engineering effort to do all these migrations was huge, and took us away from doing more valuable work.

Eventually the company couldn't sustain its workforce and we had multiple round of layoffs.

My key learnings are: - Unless you are looking for a promotion before leaving (pump and dump), hiring a lot of people in a short amount of time is bad. - Even in best scenarios, having more employees make things harder and slower. People are competing for projects, there is a need for more communication, more processes, more tools. Having a lean workforce as long as possible, focusing on what's really important is best. - It's okay if we can't do everything we want. Not so many "ideas" are valuable and employees cost - Before hiring for a new project, can't we move other resources? Is this project really important or just a distraction?