Hiring is the easy part. Rampant scaling of engineers is easy to do, if you're not paying careful attention to quality, or you're dumping cash and or options/RSUs with the promise of riches (case in point: Uber sounds like they overhired and then imploded).
How successful was your hiring? What was the performance ratings of the people that you hired and how many met your expectations and how many didn't? What was the average tenure of those employees after this big hiring spurt? Those are the more interesting pieces of information.
+1. I think rapid scale means you can't take advantage of many of the useful things about organic growth. I.e. assimilating gradually, not sabotaging the chemistry of the existing team, etc.
It also means reliant on cross-cutting resources: "architects", "product managers", etc.
More than anything, it also means a lot of firing and attrition.
If you need 100 to stay > 3 years then hire 200 and expect to lose or fire half within a year. It may sounds ridiculous but it's the cost of scaling.
Quality (for engineering skill AND attitude) was the top focus, salaries were market rate, and there are no options/RSUs involved.
Thanks for the suggestions about the follow up to hiring and measuring success. It seems most of the comments want to know more about this so I will look at a follow-up post.
How successful was your hiring? What was the performance ratings of the people that you hired and how many met your expectations and how many didn't? What was the average tenure of those employees after this big hiring spurt? Those are the more interesting pieces of information.