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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7131 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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Yeah. I'm fortunate enough to have FIREd due to hitting a SAAS startup home run but even the company I was part of has now roughly 10x'd headcount from when we hit our explosive growth phase. Maybe a quarter of that is strictly necessary for allowing people to have bums in seats/realistic worklife balance. The rest is just a slow grind towards bureaucratic inertia and shipping pace has fallen off several cliffs.

The rest is just a slow grind towards bureaucratic inertia and shipping pace has fallen off several cliffs.

It has been my observation that engineering productivity often scales sub-linearly with team size. Coordination between developers isn't zero-overhead, but it can still be "faster" (to market) overall than a small, dedicated team.

Yeah this is essentially it. When we hit our initial explosive growth we had a combination of being absurdly lucky in terms of right place/time and had some smart, skilled guys working 100-hour weeks. Now most of the original drivers have enough cash to have a strong buffer and minions, nobody's pushing it anywhere near as hard.

You jammy bugger! Congrats. That's the dream right there.

I saw the same dynamic in projects that I was part of - you can absorb a surprising number of people without really meaningfully improving performance.

I mean I'm talking essentially going from a staff of 10 of us where we were all pulling 100-hour days to now 100ish people but like the explosive growth tailed off about 70 hires ago and I'm not sure what everybody else is notionally doing when fuck all is being shipped.

I'd like the secret to pull 100-hour days seems quite useful.

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