[johnnyanmac]

>Not completing the project" is not an option—if they don't hire someone to fill a vacancy on the team, the rest of the team will just be expected to work extra hours to keep up.

And that's the opportunity cost we don't talk about. The cost isn't "we slow down on a project from a bad hire". It's "demoralize/burned out engineers quit to a point where the deadline is impossible to reach". You can't force overtime to engineers that leave and take their institutional knowledge with them

There's also a lot of fake job postings as a sort of carrot to overworked engineers that "promise more help is coming". Which is just as ingenuous to existing employees as it is to applicants.