Ask HN: Has anyone ever hired lots of developers and shipped faster as a result?

4 points by james_impliu 3 years ago | 3 comments

I've read plenty of horror stories about adding too many engineers too fast in high growth companies and the only real result being interview/onboarding chaos.

It feels like there's some complex function that describes optimal rate of hiring where you're optimizing for average speed of shipping...

Which tech companies have improved their engineering output successfully by hiring engineers fast? Why did it work for them?

Context: series b founder thinking about if we should just hire out of our profits (when we get them soon..!) the old fashioned way

thesuperbigfrog 3 years ago |

Recommended reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

Though it was written in the 1970s, the way that people write software and the invisible laws that govern that process still hold today.

This book describes those invisible laws and is worth reading if you are managing software development.

dtagames 3 years ago | |

Double up-vote for this. The most important book about the software development process that you'll ever read, from the man who ran IBM's bet-the-company System/360 product.

epirogov 3 years ago |

I have seen a team I was working in continue to hiring all the time to find great project players proven with customer source code we worked on. For fixed release date it works as for me, my team grown up to 30 people, 5 of them done features other helped them with boring but also important tasks.