Sibling post is correct: I worked in a couple companies backed by Softbank and they specifically asked for engineering headcount increase. Investors and CEOs t

Sibling post is correct: I worked in a couple companies backed by Softbank and they specifically asked for engineering headcount increase. Investors and CEOs think they need massive numbers because they misunderstand how dev headcount scales and how much overhead it generates. Hiring warehouse workers, moderators and content editors scale, so they extrapolate that to devs and expect the same results. Also with lots of devs you need lots of designers, managers, product owners and other idea people, so there’s a lot of minor tasks being pushed trough, which would otherwise not be if it was a 20 dev product. Not to mention the extra need of support, QA and ops people, which in turn needs more coordination and management. Going back to 10 or 20 devs is borderline impossible, even if you reduce the scope, since the infrastructure needed to support 100 or 1000 has too much of an overhead in itself. I would love to see someone try, though. It is also cool to have 1000 devs in case of an acqui-hire. If your product sucks, you can still sell your team. Yay.