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Tech companies dodged engineering resource allocation for a decade through overhiring

Will Larson · A masterclass in engineering leadership from Carta, Stripe, and Uber | Will Larson (CTO at Carta) · Nov 16, 2023 · at 20:14

Carta CTO Will Larson discusses how the zero-interest-rate environment masked poor resource allocation skills among engineering leaders until 2023 budget cuts.

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“One challenge of the last decade, right, is that resource allocation was largely dodged by many companies because they just Decided to spend more and hire more folks. And so oftentimes the real constraint was, like, hiring velocity on a given team and your ability to kind of, like, get recruiting aligned with your hiring managers rather than budget. I think in, in 2023 budgets fixed for a lot of companies that were previously kind of open-ended, and that's forcing, like, a level of learning that a lot of engineering leadership got to dodge for the past decade.”

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