Teams are also strongly motivated to not hire a bad team member that drags down morale and wastes resources. I want to say this is more true in government hiring, where it's difficult to fire people, but I've seen private companies hold out for a long time until they find someone with the right combination of cultural fit and technical skills.
It’s extraordinary how frequently companies discuss the cost of a bad hire and never consider the opportunity cost of a no-hire.
Companies that keep waiting for Mr. Right are really saying that the opportunity cost of not completing their project is very low. In other words it’s not really that important at all.
On the contrary. "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.
Oh, not with overtime—you're salaried, remember? (Alternate version: Oh, no, you can't actually log the extra hours; we don't have the budget for overtime, and I, the manager, can't be seen asking for more money, or it would affect my bonus!)
And you'd better step up and work those hours. You want to be seen as a team player, right?
>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.
