Scaling an Engineering Team Without Breaking It
The well-documented hiring trap from 8 to 30 engineers, and how to avoid the rebuild.
LW
Liam WuContributor, The Signal
The hardest engineering scaling curve is the one from about 8 to 30 engineers. Below 8, the team is one room. Above 30, the team has structure. In the middle, the team is in the process of inventing structure under load, and the most common failure is over-hiring before that structure exists.
The teams that navigate this well almost always hire more deliberately than their fundraising milestones suggest, augment with external engineering partners during peak demand, and resist the urge to formalize structures before the underlying processes are real.