Last weekend I was talking to one of the initial employees of a relatively well-known monitoring SAAS here in the Netherlands. Apparently their founder/owner had just decided that ~30 employees was perhaps a few too many and that he would like to keep it more lifestyle-business-ish. Fair enough, he's the owner and is allowed to make decisions like that.

This early employee was doing some real heart-searching about what he was going to do though, now that any hopes of personal growth at this company had been dashed. He could probably stay a developer there forever, of course, but any career growth would not be in the cards for at least several years since all management positions were filled and he was already the most senior engineer around.

I don't mean to imply that stable businesses who make employees happy are impossible, but at some point you will just not be able to make everyone happy at the same time.

I own and run a lifestyle business of 5 people. I don’t want it to be any larger. My biggest fear - losing key staff due to lack of career growth.

Next year we’ll drop to 4 day weeks at some point to further reward the staff beyond ever growing comp.

Seriously curious -- what "career" growth do people imagine? Apart from learning new things (which that employee can still do), what would he be looking for? Managing people? More power? Different position on a business card?

Yes, true. I forgot to mention them because I don't have (or plan to have) any :-)