Hiring won't fix a slow engineering team

Nothing speeds up a late project quite like hiring three new engineers who all need your best engineer’s attention — the one cost nobody puts in the hiring plan.

Headcount doesn’t scale linearly, because new people need mentors and eventually managers, and your first manager is usually your best engineer, who from then on writes a lot less code. And the new people just pile up behind whatever bottleneck was slowing the team down in the first place.

Most slow engineering teams aren’t short of people so much as stuck somewhere, whether on priorities that change mid-sprint, finished work waiting days for a review, or decisions waiting on one person, who is sometimes the CEO. Fixing that, together with a culture of transparency and trust where engineers understand the value they’re creating, does more for productivity than any job posting.

So the next time investors ask why the dates slipped, find the bottleneck before you hire, and if nobody on your team can find it, the person who can is your first hire.

Has a new hire ever made a late project later for you?