TL;DR - big co’s get big because hiring is an optimization problem, and each new hire gets you closer to a local maximum. E.g. if we hire an engineer to improve load times by x%, they’ll pay for themselves. More successful companies have more opportunities for positive-ROI hires, so headcount tends to scale with revenue. (And because the company is making a series of local optimizations, it may actually be worse off due to the drawbacks of being a big org.)
I thought this thread was pretty insightful, for a change: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22822995
TL;DR - big co’s get big because hiring is an optimization problem, and each new hire gets you closer to a local maximum. E.g. if we hire an engineer to improve load times by x%, they’ll pay for themselves. More successful companies have more opportunities for positive-ROI hires, so headcount tends to scale with revenue. (And because the company is making a series of local optimizations, it may actually be worse off due to the drawbacks of being a big org.)