> Rapidly growing companies tend to over-hire, and then have bored engineers that spend lots of time creating wheel-building framework frameworks instead of wor

> Rapidly growing companies tend to over-hire, and then have bored engineers that spend lots of time creating wheel-building framework frameworks instead of working on wheels. Sometimes good stuff comes out of that, but there's a ton of waste, too -- in the worst case, you end up in a company that has hundreds or thousands of people, but only a core team of a few dozen are doing all of the actual work. So you have to ask yourself: would it just be better not to hire hundreds of engineers, and cut away the complexity and inefficiency that comes with an organization of that size? This paragraph is just a criticism of R&D, and when read that way, I think the counterarguments become obvious. Can large and/or rapidly growing technology companies (particularly Internet companies) afford to not invest heavily in R&D?