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Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

IDK.

If you're in one of these too-small-high-pressure teams, and then all these extra "resources" get poured in... It can go quite badly too. IMO, engineers themselves are sometimes responsible by leaning on "we need more resources."

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I think engineers often say "we need more resources" but mean "we need to have hired more resources two years ago".

True. In some cases it can also mean that the team needs to limit the scope and focus on what really matters.

Sure, there's lots of startups burning the midnight oil to finish that MVP. But especially on more mature teams, it's incredibly easy to lose focus when doing software and spend several days on shitty features that don't really matter at all to customers, but are being prioritised due to inertia or capricious management.

Yap, I’m leading a project that could use more engineers (just two of us) cuz it’s going to be tight to hit an upcoming scaling deadline. But the thought of spending my time ramping up other engineers at this point doesn’t sound good.

One liner of the day. That's the best possible way to make this point.

This sounds like a variation of Brooks's Law - adding people to a late software project makes it later. In this case, now you need to take time to help the new resources ramp up, and the new resources themselves can't make meaningful contributions right away. So the pressure isn't alleviated for a while, and in fact goes up.

Same thing happening at the small team I am part of, we have just hired a fifth engineer, while the business often struggles to define what’s a priority.

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