Let’s consider two organisations. They each have 100 people, but one growing at 25% and the other is growing at 50%.
Under reasonable assumptions, we should expect that the faster-growth org hires 50% more people, needs to redesign its systems nearly twice as often, and its operations staff are 25% more likely to be inexperienced at the organisation.
These, and other effects, mean that the faster-growth org needs more operations staff.
80k has been hiring at ~50% per year recently, rather than the ~25% per year of our historical average. I think we’ve really felt these effects, and they’ve been larger than my intuition thought they would be! But I think that if I’d actually stared at some of these models for a while, I might have been able to anticipate them better.
I’ve built a tool to help you build your intuitions around the sizes of the effects operating here. I hope it helps!
