Unless the number of engineers they have w/ all the hiring is still less than 20, you don't. You hope that your culture is in place and strong enough to have some say over what happens in the future, but realistically if you don't have REAL leadership in the company (I mean, strong people managers, strong programming leaders and strong culture leaders...all are needed), the company won't look anything like what it does today in a year. That may be good or bad (I don't know the culture there), but it just is almost inevitable (sure, there are exceptions...but the general rule is...)

People would argue that places like facebook and/or google might have retained their culture etc etc. I doubt that there was a point when someone grew the ENTIRE engineering team 4x in a 30 day span at those companies (unless it was from small number to small still small number).

That number is a bit arbitrary, but makes sense from what I've seen and experienced at other companies. A 4x number is is hard to overcome when you have more than 4-8 core original engineers. Think about what that means. If you start with 5 devs, 30 days later you have 20? Are they seniors that can live on their own (where did you find 15 senior people in 30 days?)? Are the original people all leads who are now responsible for shepparding these new devs onward into the company (who is doing the real work for the first couple of weeks these people are coming upto speed...5 people generally don't have fully automated systems, builds, deployments, automated tests....)

Imagine if this number was 8->32 in 30 days? 10->40? 20-> 80? 100->400?

You have to lose something. I think what you lose becomes the key thing that defines what your culture is going forward...this would look to be one of those moments in a company when someone really, really needs to decide what is important to them. This is when the REAL culture will be defined for the company.

Adding more people to a software project often has the effect of making it take longer, at least for mid to near term milestones. Quadrupling sounds like the adage of pouring gasoline on a fire.

Your attitude may be appropriate for software development, but if we're talking about the number of IT people watching the server farm, more is probably better.

I know that - you know that - and they probably do to.

I think in this case the point is to reassure people that they are taking it seriously.

True, but it may not be the case that all of this new staff is going to increasing the size of existing project teams... they could be spinning up whole new teams for new projects - for which the idea had been stuck on the back-burner.

I'm surprised that this has so many upvotes. Are you all net this simplistic?

It's probably that the upvoters all read the Mythical Man-Month.

Yes, my comment is a clear rip off of MMM.

Right, but they are a company thinking in terms of years going forward. Gotta get people hired at some point.

What did it quadruple from? One to four? Two to eight? I'm being serious; isn't all of tumblr numbered at around 20 people, or am I mistaken? Their About page says "we've grown from a team of two, to more than ten people."

It sounds to me like their biggest problem was growing too slowly.