The tech industry has seen unprecedented growth over the last five years. Some of the biggest tech companies have experienced meteoric rises, driven by innovation, ambitious projects, and a hunger for market dominance. However, this rapid growth has also exposed uncomfortable truths: scaling too quickly can lead to significant internal challenges. While this issue exists in various sectors, this article focuses on tech teams and how they scale. Recently, numerous companies with massive investments in tech have resorted to widespread layoffs, redundancy exercises, and voluntary attrition strategies, making the environment uncomfortable enough for team members to leave.

This trend highlights a critical problem in how tech companies approach growth: the assumption that hiring more people automatically leads to getting more done. But growth isn’t always linear. Adding headcount can dilute capabilities, slow processes, and paradoxically, make teams less productive.

The Dilemma of Scaling Through Headcount

Executives often view employees as resources to scale in two ways: by growing their skills and expertise or by simply hiring more people. The former takes time—a resource many impatient executives are unwilling to invest in. As a result, the latter option becomes the default strategy. The logic seems simple: more people should mean more work gets done, right?

Not quite. You can’t have nine women make a baby in one month, and adding ten times the number of people doesn’t result in ten times the productivity. The reality of rapid growth is far more nuanced.

1. Dilution of Capabilities: When companies rapidly hire new talent, they often overlook the time and resources required to upskill these new hires. In the tech world, new developers or engineers don’t just hit the ground running—they need training, mentoring, and time to adapt to the company’s unique processes, technologies, and culture. If too many new hires come in at once, it can overwhelm the onboarding system, leading to a dilution of expertise within the team. They might contribute to technical debt due to poorly developed or communicated internal processes, use unsanctioned technologies due to a lack of mentorship, or even create cultural rifts within the organization.
2. Quality vs. Quantity: With the pressure to scale fast, hiring processes are often rushed. This can result in subpar candidates filling key roles, further straining team productivity. Are tech companies, in their pursuit of rapid growth, ensuring they are hiring the best talent? Or are they simply filling seats, hoping to solve short-term capacity issues? Are internal promotions justified, or would external expertise better fit certain key roles to ensure that the best person is realizing the organization’s goals?
3. Leadership Strain: One of the most critical but overlooked aspects of growth is leadership. Can a manager who effectively handled a team of five suddenly manage a team of 30 or more? As teams expand, leadership requirements change, and not all managers can adapt to the new scale. Similarly, promoting a high-performing software developer into a managerial role often fails when that developer lacks leadership training or experience. Scaling a team without scaling leadership capabilities can lead to chaos and a stagnation in productivity.
4. Onboarding Bottlenecks: Onboarding processes that worked well for smaller teams often crumble under the weight of rapid growth. Many companies don’t invest in evolving their onboarding systems to keep up with the influx of new hires. As a result, new employees take longer to become productive, further slowing down the overall output of the team.

The True Cost of Rapid Growth

The need for speed often blinds companies to the long-term consequences of poor growth strategies. When layoffs or redundancies happen, it’s often because these companies hit a wall—they’ve hired too many people too fast and can no longer sustain the inefficiencies that come with such rapid expansion.

1. Employee Burnout: Overburdened teams, stretched thin by a lack of leadership and ineffective new hires, often experience high levels of burnout. In many organizations, the few high performers end up carrying the majority of the workload. For perspective, imagine 20% of the workforce doing 80% of the work—a reality in many tech companies. This imbalance can be even worse in organizations that fail to manage growth effectively.
2. Voluntary Attrition: Some workers have accused companies of intentionally making work conditions uncomfortable to push employees to leave voluntarily, thus saving on severance costs. Policies that inconvenience employees—like sudden return-to-office mandates—have sparked these accusations. Many employees who were more productive during the pandemic due to remote work are now required to return to the office, regardless of their performance metrics. For employees hired during the pandemic, who may have never worked in the office, this mandate forces them to either comply or move, sometimes leaving their families behind. Additionally, stories of unsafe or unsanitary working conditions further fuel dissatisfaction, creating a toxic environment and damaging the company’s reputation.
3. Leadership Shortcomings: Rapid growth exposes weaknesses in leadership, especially when those in charge lack experience in managing larger teams. Middle managers and team leads are often promoted without sufficient training or support, leading to poor decision-making and ineffective team management.
4. Stagnation of Innovation: Ironically, the very thing that rapid growth is supposed to drive—innovation—often suffers. As new hires struggle to get up to speed, existing teams are burdened with onboarding and managing these new employees, leaving less time for creative problem-solving and innovation. Growth, in this case, becomes counterproductive.

Moving Forward: Sustainable Growth

So how can companies avoid the pitfalls of rapid growth? The answer lies in adopting a more sustainable approach to scaling:

1. Invest in Leadership: Scaling a team isn’t just about adding headcount; it’s about ensuring that leadership is equipped to manage larger, more complex teams. This means training new managers, creating clear leadership development paths, and recognizing that top-performing developers don’t always translate into great managers.
2. Refine the Hiring Process: Companies must resist the temptation to hire quickly and instead focus on hiring the right talent. Taking more time to vet candidates may seem slow, but in the long run, it leads to stronger, more cohesive teams.
3. Strengthen Onboarding Systems: Robust onboarding processes are essential to ensuring new hires become productive quickly. As teams grow, onboarding systems must scale accordingly, incorporating mentorship programs, training modules, and clear expectations for new employees.
4. Foster Organic Team Growth: Rather than relying solely on external hires, companies should focus on growing talent from within. This takes more time but pays off in creating a more skilled, cohesive, and loyal workforce that can scale with the company’s needs.

Conclusion

The tech industry’s rapid growth has brought both successes and significant challenges. While adding headcount may seem like the quickest way to scale, it often leads to long-term inefficiencies, leadership strain, and, eventually, layoffs. Sustainable growth requires companies to rethink their approach, invest in leadership, refine hiring processes, and strengthen onboarding systems. Only then can they avoid the painful consequences of rapid, unchecked growth.