Yep, this is what happens when your "growth" metric is employee headcount, under the naïve assumption that more people is a proxy for more work getting done is a proxy for revenue. This may make more sense for a sales-focused organization, less so for marketing or technology driven organization.

Maybe not a proxy per se, but more like a leading indicator, right? Those big enterprise customers might not ask about revenue, but the sales unit can certainly brag about headcount.

The moment that any indicator becomes a goal it instantly becomes completely useless as an indicator or metric for anything.

Absolutely agree. I wrote the comment while thinking, why would a company need a proxy for revenue, when revenue is so easy to count? On reflection I now understand the GP’s point; when revenue is zero, you need something to use instead.

But of course revenue (and, having achieved that, then profit IMO) should be among the concrete goals. It’s so weird that this is missed so often.

In a way it seems like SWE jobs in tech hubs are subsidized by VCs. We can see it as some huge redistribution of wealth.

With an important caveat. The SWEs in the Bay Area are just conduits for obscene sums of money flowing from VCs to real-estate agents, landlords and homeowners. Plus car dealerships, perhaps (every other car is a Tesla or a higher-end BMW/Mercedes model in the Bay Area).

This is the correct interpretation. All those high salaries are high to cover high standards of living and high prices.

The standards of living are high only because of the natural bounty of the Bay Area. Pretty good weather, stunning natural beauty with easy access to plentiful and varied open spaces, some of the best produce in the nation thanks to the most fertile and productive farmland in the world (central valley), multicultural, and generally tolerant and respectful people.

But many of the objective things that count towards a high standard of living are not much better than the rest of the nation, given the eye-watering tax burdens on CA residents. California roads are amongst the worst, housing quality is generally poor and nothing to write home about, failure to promote dense housing has led to encroachment on wooded areas that are huge fire risks, zero investment in burying power lines has exacerbated forest fires even further, and heavy property crime due to the exploding homeless population in core urban areas is continuously threatening public safety. Not to mention the insanely high gas prices (due to CA taxes), consumption taxes and effectively high property taxes which all hit living standards of average people quite hard.

Only a fraction of software engineers work for VC backed companies.

Reminds me of my dotcom boom/bust experience of the late nineties where the dotcom was posting monthly "hiring targets" and celebrating that they met them. They were so screwed and tanked badly right after March 2000.

March 2001