Do you know what the ideal ratio of developers to non-tech staff is?

I was listening to The Engineering Leadership Podcast today when Kenny Shin, the CTO of Fundrise mentioned that the ratio for them ended up being about 30%.

"We generally needed about to have about 1/3 of our staff to be engineering no matter what size we were"

At Adadot we analysed data in 38,000 developer datasets from GitLab, GitHub, Slack and Google Calendar.

The 1/3 rule holds broadly true but there are nuances:- It depends on whether its a tech company or a tech assisted company, like a marketplace. The engineering teams in the latter can be as low as 10%- In some really tech-heavy businesses like SaaS the engineering component can be up to 70%- Stage matters. In the very early days teams are more engineering heavy

Why does this matter right now?

Most companies are responding to current market conditions with layoffs, however, they are not adjusting their roadmaps to the same degree.

If the ratios are unbalanced this has a direct impact of the engineering team's ability to perform.