Butterfield: Employees instinctively push to hire direct reports to boost status
Stewart Butterfield · Mental models for building products people love ft. Stewart Butterfield · Nov 20, 2025 · at 56:34
Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield discusses organizational scaling dynamics and why headcount bloat occurs naturally across growing companies.
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“The overwhelming majority of people you hire want to hire more people who report to them. And it's not because they're evil and it's not because they're stupid. In fact, they're smart because everyone knows that the number of people who report to you correlates with like your career trajectory, your, the amount of money that you're paid, The amount of authority you have inside the organization”
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