[benohear]

That annoyed me too. I can see the point of decreasing the bugs introduced (eg by working less hours and better testing methods), but at some point your team will be at full capacity so you will need to expand. It seems that the only solution is to do so far enough in advance so the new hire has time to be broken in before the extra productivity becomes necessary.

One thought is to look at what can be reasonably offloaded to a new person. For example I recently had to step in and sort out the HTML for a project for which we did design and where the developers were struggling and overwhelmed. Not having to worry about how things looked anymore was a big burden off their shoulders, and it's a well enough contained area that I could be productive pretty much instantly.