The author isn't saying that it's a bad thing, or something that good employees shouldn't be doing. Rather that it's a thing that happens, and is important to your employees, so if you don't address it or aren't attune to it then problems ensue.
Especially when you look beyond the hubris of the word "career" and consider that a very important part of "building a career" is growing your skills, experience & knowledge. That's something both employee and employer should want.
I'm glad you all seem to have understood what I was getting at. I think you're nailing it best, Silverstorm; career growth, long term goals, adding new skills...I put them all in the same bucket.
In my experience, when you help people with their long term goals, even if it's not their core job, you get a much more motivated team member.
I'm a big fan of what Reid Hoffman advocates for in the Alliance; work is a two way relationship and if we treat it that way, and are honest about it, we can all benefit more.
Sometimes, people think they want to be "Managers." I tell them to stop worrying about that. Start ACTING and PERFORMING like a Director or VP, and then you can skip the Manager step.
I don't think people "always must care about their careers." I am pretty sure Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg could not care less about their careers when they started as employee # < 25. They just wanted to build a company and a business.
As a founder, you already have the ultimate, self-actualized career: founder. Gates never really had a job. Neither did Zuck, and we all know Jobs didn't last at Atari...and when they did build a company, they were caring about their career: to stay as CEO of their respective companies.
The post was focused on the employees and what happens to them, because they do care about their careers.
In the beginning, career advancement can often come from getting a project you are entirely unprepared and/or unqualified for dumped in your lap. Around 20-30 employees, that stops. So employees rightfully wonder how they move up.
Exactly why I believe that the original wording is a bit inadequate. Plenty of people in very small companies are still focused on career advancement in general.
What he means is, "You start hiring mercenaries rather than 'true believers.' "
True believers make great cannon fodder. They'll work crazy hours, take prod-support duties with no expectation of reward, and do the grunt work without asking whether it benefits their careers. It's not that they don't care about their careers; it's that they still believe that their careers are perfectly correlated with the success of the company, and will make a lot of unwise sacrifices. They often overestimate how locked-in their promotions are (they expect to grow with the company, and are shocked when it doesn't happen) and the future improvement of their equity position.
See, non-founding employees in most startups get very small equity slices-- it's typically about 2% * N(-1.2) for employee #N; this means that only about 11% will ever be allocated to non-founding employees, which is about right-- and fall into two categories: (a) those who don't take the equity seriously, work 9-to-5, and optimize for their careers-- and this can work out well for the company because there are benefits to doing well at a reputable startup-- (b) true believers who think their initial 0.5% (as Employee #3) is just a "teaser" and will be re-uped to "the real amount" 10x higher once they prove themselves. Of course, that isn't the case. In fact, that only happens in event of a major promotion and those are rare because (although there are exceptions) startups tend to get the Social Climber Complex and hand out new executive positions to externals.
Around 25 people is where employees' equity slices drop below the 0.1% mark, which is when it's clear that they're not really owners or genuine partners in the company, and probably never will be. So the good people (mercenaries) are the career optimizers and the "true believers" you get, at that point, aren't very good. (The TBs that you get early on aren't that talented, either, but they'll at least take a lot of abuse and risk.)
The headline is kind of clickbaity, since what the author really says is that everything breaks at 10-40 employees, which is much less useful as a benchmark. I'm an early employee (no. 10 or so) at a very fast-growing startup (https://www.futureadvisor.com).
We're now at about 45 people, and more than 50 including contractors. Nothing's broken yet. We had to change, we did, we'll have to change again.
We have a product (online investment management) that we believe in, and two founders who have created a great place to work. Sure, people are here because it was a good career move and it's exciting to be in a growing company. But they're also hear because they like it. They like their teams. They like the mission. It's fun. It's meaningful.
Maybe this startup is doing everything right. But maybe this article is scaring people too much, as well.
Well, why not? People always must care about their careers. It is a sane thing to do. From the beginning.