Comment by shusaku
4 days ago
I don’t understand the argument for being patient. If you think the new hire will lead to increased profits, there’s an opportunity cost every day you don’t have them on board. And sure, maybe you wait for the best person and they are more productive, but they might be out the door in a few years.
Quality is more important than quantity in engineering, so a mediocre hire can be a net negative. In so many ways:
- consuming time and attention from people who help them
- time spend checking and fixing their work
- additional maintenance costs from poorly thought out solutions
- time spent reproducing and fixing bugs
- lowering morale of better engineers
- creating whatever the opposite of “a culture of excellence” is
- consuming management time in performance management
- inability to interview or saying “yes” to even worse hires
good thing the modern interview process is so efficient at filtering against candidates like this /s