Comment by theamk

There is always a need for very good engineers, and you never know when one will come up.

As other posters said, if you get a bad hire (or even mediocre hire), it might be total negative - both because of negative contributions, but also because maybe the management only gave you one spot, and now you've given it to mediocre person, you no longer have a chance to giving to someone better.

Back when I was at a startup, we've were looking for the new people basically constantly. Very few people applied however (we were C++, not web, and in the constrained system...) and even fewer people passed, so we ended up with 1-2 people per year total.