<story><title>Why You Shouldn&apos;t Hire More Developers</title><url>http://blog.patchspace.co.uk/why-you-shouldnt-hire-more-developers</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brador</author><text>Failure point: You waited too long to hire a new developer.&lt;p&gt;You thought you could handle it, but couldn&apos;t, and you should have seen this coming.  The team leader failed here and let a severe issue (overwork of staff) cover his ass on costs.&lt;p&gt;We always have an extra developer on every team, no one does crazy overtime.  It&apos;s worth the extra $0-$30k for the intern/half-timer.  The kid gets experience and we get a backup.&lt;p&gt;Should we lose a live dev, we prop the intern/half up to full and we&apos;re back up to speed.  We also track overwork/hours.&lt;p&gt;Once again, the team leader failed.  You SHOULD hire more developers, and you should hire them sooner, specifically because a training period is involved.&lt;p&gt;This is something anyone who&apos;s spent time in a growing organization could advise you on, and a good reason to have mentors if you&apos;re inexperienced in business.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>matwood</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Failure point: You waited too long to hire a new developer.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is what I was coming to say.  Of course Alice is going to take some handholding because she&apos;s new.  She could be an A+ developer and will still require team time to help her get up to speed.  The problem is that the team in the article waited too long to bring Alice on.  They were already far too behind the 8 ball to have any time to get her up to speed.  If they had brought her on sooner then they might not have ever been in the situation to start.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why You Shouldn&apos;t Hire More Developers</title><url>http://blog.patchspace.co.uk/why-you-shouldnt-hire-more-developers</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brador</author><text>Failure point: You waited too long to hire a new developer.&lt;p&gt;You thought you could handle it, but couldn&apos;t, and you should have seen this coming.  The team leader failed here and let a severe issue (overwork of staff) cover his ass on costs.&lt;p&gt;We always have an extra developer on every team, no one does crazy overtime.  It&apos;s worth the extra $0-$30k for the intern/half-timer.  The kid gets experience and we get a backup.&lt;p&gt;Should we lose a live dev, we prop the intern/half up to full and we&apos;re back up to speed.  We also track overwork/hours.&lt;p&gt;Once again, the team leader failed.  You SHOULD hire more developers, and you should hire them sooner, specifically because a training period is involved.&lt;p&gt;This is something anyone who&apos;s spent time in a growing organization could advise you on, and a good reason to have mentors if you&apos;re inexperienced in business.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ohyes</author><text>In fact, if everyone is working a 60 hour week, they should have hired an extra 2 1/2 developers.&lt;p&gt;If you aren&apos;t making enough money to cover the extra 100 hours of development, perhaps you need to change your pricing strategy or have lower expectations for margins.</text></comment>