Software may never be finished (in your opinion) but the budget of any customer is finite. If you keep reinvesting your revenue forever into "engineering" the product there's going to be a time where a competitor comes in with a finished product matching your customers' requirements and snatches him from you by both charging less and making a profit.
Software doesn’t win by being “finished” it wins by out competing other software
And yes, I am making a good case for mature software with those lovely examples. But clearly they wanted more widgets and they kept engineers who can deliver those widgets. This wasn't some unsustainable thing for Youtube as the top comment argues. And that's how most software businesses work as of now. If you remain complacent, you're slowly dying to competition. Because the demand for more still exists.
Bending Spoons buys stalled or failed products and keeps them alive with a central engineering team in Italy which is far cheaper than anything in the US.
That's their business model. If the company you work for is acquired by them you should start looking for a new place.
I'm going on a limb here and saying that the scale that YouTube was running on back in 2010-2015 is not the same scale as now, and if they had left their whole infrastructure unchanged, a "finished product", so to speak, the site would have been feeling dated and would have eventually been killed off.
Just look at Google. They could have stopped writing new software at any point and been just fine. But in the long run they'd have missed out on trillions of dollars.
As with everything in business, it comes down to risk/reward. Not every risk pays off, but some do.
The key is knowing when to stop. Unfortunately permanent employment does not provide an incentive for anyone involved to speak up when they think it's that time.
Okay. Most businesses also fail. Is that a reason for existing ones to stop growing?
Not if you find new ways to appeal to them once you have them as users.
The search engine markets is finite, so Alphabet expanded elsewhere
Doch, even then.
Back at university, we had practice sessions about our CVs and job interviews. Mine had a cliché in it, "committed to quality"*. The businessperson who was helping us figure out how to be any good at the jobs market, picked up on it with an example:
Which is higher quality? A Porsche, or a go-kart?
Except no; you didn't consider who the customer was. If this is for a kid who just wants to have some fun, they can't afford a Porsche, they've got no insurance, they don't know how to drive. A go-kart solves their problem, they get to have fun, a Porsche doesn't.
* I was 19 or 20 when I wrote that, it was about as true as when ChatGPT writes the same: I didn't know any better.
The reason why software companies grow, is because businesses demands growth.
I suppose you could build a simple, small app and leave it on "maintenance" (even then, it's going to be difficult due to crumbling infra) but real world products don't work that way.
Companies want to scale, add features and expand to various verticals. They also have to compete with other companies , there is regulations, compliance and never ending list of incoming features from sales, marketing and customers.
Elon Musk famously attempted to run Twitter "lean", and look how that ended.
Unless you are able to curb the corporate greed, you will need to grow your engineering team.
There's only so much growth you can achieve in any vertical - the key is to realize when you've hit that limit and cut your losses. Unfortunately as a company employee you have no incentive to do that.
I doubt Vimeo would've sold if there was still lots of growth potential on the table. They've exhausted it, and for various factors were unable to cut costs internally.
Bending Spoons evaluated the situation and determined they can still extract a certain amount of profit by massively cutting costs - they gave chunk of said expected profit to the current owners, and are now implementing said strategy.
> Elon Musk famously attempted to run Twitter "lean", and look how that ended.
The decline of Twitter has all to do with Musk's politics and lack of any kind of strategy of the product (makes sense if you see it as his personal mouthpiece rather than a business). Tech-wise it seems to be working well enough. Cutting 80% of expensive engineering staff for a 1% drop in uptime of a non-critical service with no SLAs is a no-brainer.
This seemed to end pretty well. He overpaid for it, but the website kept functioning without issues.