[moconnor]

What's all the fuss about getting new developers up to speed? This time last year we added two new hires to a team of three, working on a ~500k LOC project. Unlike this example, our project wasn't late and adding them didn't slow us down, it sped us up.

They both delivered valuable new features in the next release a few months later, fully pulling their weight. Now, they're bringing new hires up to speed.

We spent a long time (several months) looking for very good people. We imported one of them from Germany. Perhaps Brooke's law only applies because the sort of developers you can hire in a hurry aren't the sort of developers who are going to hit the ground running.

TL;DR In my experience you really should hire more developers and you should do it before anybody starts working a 60 hour week.