[matwood]

Failure point: You waited too long to hire a new developer.

This is what I was coming to say. Of course Alice is going to take some handholding because she's new. She could be an A+ developer and will still require team time to help her get up to speed. The problem is that the team in the article waited too long to bring Alice on. They were already far too behind the 8 ball to have any time to get her up to speed. If they had brought her on sooner then they might not have ever been in the situation to start.

[roc]

But the corollary is that the longer they wait to hire Alice, the worse the situation gets.

That is: they should have hired her yesterday and hiring her today won't help the current cycle, but you have to hire her today to have any hope for the future. [1]

[1] Unless you have incredibly isolated projects, in which case you can arguably put off hiring Alice until after the release, but you'll still need to bring her on well before the next one gets under way.

[matwood]

Yeah, I should have been more clear. I agree with you that hiring Alice then was the right thing to do even if late. Worst case is she can start learning the code base on her own until the current cycle finishes and the team has more time to spend with her.