Comment by kypro

> My early jobs were at startups startups with limited resources. Every decision to build something or hire someone was carefully made after much consideration. This story would have looked like fiction to me at the time.

This was pre-2015

> Later in my career I joined a startup like this where every new concern someone could think up turned into a new microservice with new hires to form a new team. It didn't matter how small it was, everything was a reason to hire new people and form a new team. I sat in meetings where the express goal of the quarter was communicated as growing the engineering team.

This was post-2015

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Am I right?

You're describing exactly what I've tried to express in various comments. There was a point in the latter half of the 2010s when it became genuinely hard to find tech work where you were building useful stuff. Startups become increasingly absurd and the focuses of their engineering teams even more so.

In 2019 I was working for a company who were so desperate to hire new engineers at one point they decided to just start offering jobs to candidates which failed interviews. It was absolutely insane.