Comment by belval

> it's insane that these companies aren't just training up more internally

Adding headcount to a fast growing company *to lower wages* is a sure way to kill your culture, lower the overall quality bar and increase communication overheads significantly.

Yes they are paying a lot of their employees and the pool will grow, but adding bodies to a team that is running well in hopes that it will automatically lead to a bump in productivity is the part that is insane. It never works.

What will happen is a completely new team (team B) will be formed and given ownership of a component that was previously owned by team A under the guise of "we will just agree on interfaces". Team B will start doing their thing and meeting with Team A representative regularly but integration issues will still arise, except that instead of a tight core of 10-20 developers, you now have 40. They will add a ticketing to track change better, now issues in Team's B service, which could have been addressed in an hour by the right engineer on team A, will take 3 days to get resolved as ticket get triaged/prioritized. Lo and behold, Team C as now appeared and will be owning a sub-component of Team B. Now when Team A has issue with Team B's service, they cut a ticket, but the oncall on Team B investigates and finds that it's actually an issue with Team C's service, they cut their own ticket.

Suddenly every little issue takes days and weeks to get resolved because the original core of 10-20 developers is no longer empowered to just move fast. They eventually leave because they feel like their impact and influence has diminished (Team C's manager is very good at politics), Team A is hollowed out and you now have wall-to-wall mediocrity with 120 headcounts and nothing is ever anyone's fault.

I had a director that always repeated that communication between N people is inherently N² and thus hiring should always weight in that the candidate being "good" is not enough, they have to pull their weight and make up for the communication overhead that they add to the team.