[mildtrepidation]

If one doctor can transplant a heart in ten hours, can ten nurses transplant that heart in one hour? Can a hundred nursing assistants transplant that heart in six minutes? Can six hundred hospital receptionists transplant that heart in one minute?

All of the people involved have useful and important skills, but they are not appropriate or relevant for the operation in question. My only change here would have been to swap receptionists out for interns: The skills are still relevant, but the experience is not there and the expectation is still unreasonable.

No, development is not surgery (certainly not brain surgery, and usually not heart surgery). But it is often complex work that requires not just an understanding of what to do, but also how to do it, why to do it that way, what alternatives are available and how they might benefit the work in the future, how requirements tend to change, the difference between what clients/bosses say and what clients/bosses mean...

It's vital that we have new developers. But the point of having new developers is that they become experienced developers; a swarm of n00bs is not, in and of itself, valuable. Treating it as such is dangerous, as many, many rescue projects painfully illustrate.