> and the reason they grew too big is because they took the company public and in that sphere success is measured in growth
Why is "growth" always interpreted as "higher headcount" and not "higher profits"?
Certainly a company that has continually growing profits without increasing costs would be seen as more valuable than a company that constantly increases their costs with revenue?
Does Unity hiring more Engineers actually increase revenue?
very generalized answer here but it comes down to:
1. you want to make sure product A is profitable
2. at some point Product A will reach a steady state (in some utopic future, but let's pretend). i.e. Product A will hit a point where its excitement will taper off.
3. How do you get that explosive growth back? New product. But you want to maintain old product.
4. hire more people to work on Product B. Have it launch, big growth!
5. then recession hits and it turns out you need stability. Product A is fine, everyone on Product B is fired
profits are important, but it's not the end all be all for how the stock market works. It may not even be the most important factor. You want to build excitement and become the thing big thing, even if it turns out to be a check you can't cash. So in that lens, Unity hires (or hired) more engineers or acquires companies to increase excitement, not necessarily to increase profits. "Product A" is ads, and right now even that isn't very stable for them, so I guess they are trying to find a new Product A.
Back in the old days, Game studios used to simply make games to build this excitement. It has a set track, a big time to announce and release for spikes, and your existing teams works on the next game. But more studios want to get that "Product A", so even games are investing more in GaaS for that steady income. It's what ended up happening to Epic with Fortnite, where their "Product B" is actually announcing exciting engine features.
> 2. at some point Product A will reach a steady state (in some utopic future, but let's pretend). i.e. Product A will hit a point where its excitement will taper off.
> 4. hire more people to work on Product B. Have it launch, big growth!
Why is the answer "hire more people to work on Product B" and not "Move people from A to B and shrink the product A team to focus on bug fixes and security fixes"
I would think that the desire to hire a whole new team rather than move staff is what keeps Zawinski's Law [0] around.
It's not mutually exclusive. But it depends on Product B, and oftentimes these kinds of tech companies want to grow in completely different areas.
Take Amazon, for example: they have great engineers, but probably not too many game developers (or those interested in moving from current SWE positions to the game division). And they almost certainly had no artists on board, among other disciplines needed for a game. So when making Amazon Games they would have to mostly hire new staff. Not the best example given how they floundered for a decade, but I think that was a management issue over a talent issue.
Perhaps because it is generally well accepted that you can maintain stable profit margins with a fixed employee count, but increasing profits with a fixed employee count is not possible beyond the maximum potential of that fixed set of employees?
(Not sure, this is an amateur's guess on my part.)
Why is "growth" always interpreted as "higher headcount" and not "higher profits"?
Certainly a company that has continually growing profits without increasing costs would be seen as more valuable than a company that constantly increases their costs with revenue?
Does Unity hiring more Engineers actually increase revenue?