Hacker News Reader

Conversely, budgets are based on estimates and forecast of resources needed. It's not like a manager gets a random number out of the blue and then needs to find ways to spend it. Budgets in engineering, especially software dev., are mostly based on number of people (aka 'resources') needed in the team, so a manager will want to fill their headcount otherwise it means they don't actually need this number of people.

View on HN

Feel free to contradict me with personal experience, but I actually posit that (like many interesting phenomena in life), the truth is exactly the opposite. The number of people in a team expands to fill the budget allocated. That budget flows from a legible & convincing narrative told to the check-writers (internal or external) that may or may not overlap with reality.

Managers have an interest in expanding their "fiefdom" and thus push to get more and more people (either by grabbing actual work or by generating work). This is indeed how you create a "legible & convincing narrative" to increase your budget (end goal being more people, more power).

In some startup envrionments the execs may want to show growth by hiring as much as possible but that's not your typical company.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com