Earlier quoted context omitted.
Growing too fast is damaging to both culture and productivity. You have a bunch of people starting that are still learning. Depending on the job and the person it can take a full year to be fully competent in a job. Apple was smart to move slower. They are probably one of the best run companies in the world.
> Growing too fast is damaging to both culture and productivity. This seems to be general sentiment here lately. Do you have any evidence to support this or is purely conjecture?
New hires take anywhere from 3 months to 8 months or more depending on the position to ramp up
During ramp up period, there’s a productivity toll taken on the team via teaching the new hire
Thus during this time, productivity is hampered
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For culture, I think it’s a bit more subjective. But if you have a team of 5 who then gets 1 new hire to teach over 6 months, generally it allows them to “mesh” better in the culture.
Both in terms of team mates learning about the new hire, and the new hire having room to fit in within the culture, and bring their own value to the team (assuming an already existing good culture.
Now say you have 3 new hires on a team of 5. If we further presume productivity is also hampered more as more people are onboarded at once, that creates additional stress on the team to teach them.
Further, it could be harder to have the new hires feel part of the team if less time is spent getting to know each one. But assume this isn’t the case:
Business will most likely expect at least the same productivity from the team. Now they’re stressed from teaching, higher expectations on their output (onboarding a team member is tiring work), and the business is going to soon expect productivity to increase further after headcount is upped by over 50% in this example.
Now take that, and add on new teams created to interact with, additional communication layers, and it’s pretty straightforward to assume growing too fast can be negative