>>I feel deranged pointing this out, but hiring triple the headcount you need to run your business is not a progressive social value. I don't know what it is.

>>I feel deranged pointing this out, but hiring triple the headcount you need to run your business is not a progressive social value. I don't know what it is. To me it feels like a byproduct of an overemphasis on a certain kind of inclusiveness, in which people are elevated based on how long they’ve been around and how much buyin there is into the mission. Everyone’s opinion is valued, everyone wants resources, everyone wants to be promoted. If there’s not money constraints or a sense of practicality driving decisions, everyone gets headcount and promotions, driving bloat. My last job was with a very mission driven startup. We were short on money so headcount wasn’t bloated, but we were plagued by “managers” with no one under them who’d been around since the beginning and didn’t contribute much. The product drifted, and we wasted a lot of time. I switched to a new, more unapologetically capitalist company, and my team has been subject to some absolutely cold blooded re-orgs. It’s a much less friendly place, but much, much better run in terms of getting stuff done. Not sure what the moral is. I made some great friends at the first company, not so much at the second. But the new place is in many ways a much less frustrating place to work.