[Gh0stRAT]

There are costs to onboarding a new employee (not just in money, but also in time and attention from more-tenured teammates, finding good "starter" tickets for them to work on, longer standups, interviewing their replacement after they leave, etc)

For pretty much any team, there's some ramp-up time where a new employee won't be contributing much and may be taking more time/attention from your experienced employees and manager. (explaining how the system works, code reviews, helping debug why something's not working, etc etc) There's some break-even tenure below which it's a net loss for a team to have hired someone. It'll be different for each team and also different for each new-hire. Maybe it's only a couple days, or maybe it's 6+ months. Either way, managers should at least be aware of this when making hiring decisions. (exception: unless they're at a cushy enough gig where there's not much/any pressure to deliver)

[avmich]

> (exception: unless they're at a cushy enough gig where there's not much/any pressure to deliver)

Another exception: when the applicant is actually passing able/willing interviews.

Do you really think a good engineer would leave willy-nilly a good place to work? I've yet to see a good software engineer who loves interviewing for the process of it.

[atq2119]

> Do you really think a good engineer would leave willy-nilly a good place to work?

No. Which is precisely why, via contrapositive, a string of short stints is a relevant signal that the person might not be a good engineer.

[themitigating]

I agree about the cost of hiring and on boarding time but you should know by three months if it is going to work out.

There's also a cost to not having the proper head count