[jjm]

Extremely shitty planning. Your 4 devs working 20 hour days for months? Hire more devs! Can't find devs to work shitty hours? Pay more!

[kelnos]

Hiring more devs is often not the answer. Setting realistic schedules is.

[jjm]

When your _this_ low on staff, no amount of scheduling is going to make Johnny 80/hrs a week work any better for the next two years...

[kelnos]

Of course not. Johnny's productivity is going to be severely affected by a few months of 80 hrs/wk. If you don't have enough staff to do what you want in however long, you have to take longer, or hire more people.

But I wasn't referring to that situation. For a given project, there's an optimal team size. Adding people to that team can often reduce the productivity of the team as a whole. There's a limit at which you just can't get the project done any sooner. In that case you need to set a realistic schedule given these limitations.

[mikiem]

Reminds me of The Mythical Man Month (book): "Adding more programmers to an already-late project will result in the project becoming even later"