More People, Same Bottleneck

The obvious answer

When delivery slows, hiring feels like progress. There’s work waiting. People are stretched. Target dates are slipping. Surely we need more people. Sometimes we do. A genuine shortage of skills or capacity deserves attention, but a growing backlog doesn’t, by itself, tell us what’s preventing work from getting finished. Still, headcount is easy to see and easy to request. An unreliable test environment is harder to explain in a budget meeting. It rarely wears a lanyard.

Scaling the frustration

Imagine hiring several capable engineers into a team where builds are unreliable, access takes weeks and every release depends on the same overstretched specialist. The new arrivals bring energy and experience. They also encounter the same obstacles as everyone else. So they improvise. Another script. Another workaround. Another meeting to coordinate the workarounds.

Each response may be reasonable locally. Together, they can make the system more complicated to operate and harder to improve. We’ve increased the number of people trying to get through the bottleneck. The bottleneck remains remarkably unmoved by our recruitment success. Even excellent people struggle when the conditions make useful work difficult. Eventually, some leave. We then recruit replacements to experience the problem afresh.

The work beneath the work

Tooling, infrastructure, environments and quality practices shape what a team can accomplish. Reliable builds shorten feedback loops. Accessible environments reduce waiting. Useful automated checks catch problems earlier. Clear documentation makes joining the team less dependent on finding the one person who remembers why everything works this way.

These improvements don’t always produce an impressive announcement. Nobody hires a photographer because the deployment process has become uneventful, but their effect reaches across the team. Removing a recurring obstacle can give existing people more capacity while making future hires effective sooner.

Before adding people, I’d want to understand where effort is going. How much time do we spend delivering useful changes? How much goes into waiting, chasing access, repairing environments or recovering from defects? The answer may still support hiring. It may also reveal that we’re paying skilled people to compensate for problems we keep postponing.

When size becomes success

There can be organisational reasons to favour hiring, too. A larger team can signal importance. More direct reports can bring status. Growing departments create demand for more management, which can make further growth seem necessary. None of this requires bad intentions. Incentives can make expanding the organisation more attractive than improving how it works.

A manager who removes the need for ten additional roles may contribute more value than one who successfully recruits them. The second achievement is often easier to put on a slide.

Diagnose before expanding

Hiring should respond to a constraint we understand. If we lack a skill, recruit or develop it. If demand exceeds the capacity of a functioning system, additional people may help. If work spends weeks waiting for approval, another developer is unlikely to make the approver available. We also need to account for onboarding and coordination. New colleagues need support before they can contribute independently. Adding people changes the work as well as the capacity available to do it. I’d want us to improve those conditions alongside any recruitment.

Things I’d listen out for

• “We don’t have time to improve the environment, we need everyone to deliver.”
• “Once the new starters arrive, we’ll finally be able to move faster.”
• “We have to keep hiring. Everything takes too long.”
• “We need more developers to clear the backlog.”
• “We’ll fix the tooling once we’ve caught up.”

I’d ask where work gets stuck, what another person would actually unblock and which improvements would help everyone already here. There’s little value in scaling a system whose main achievement is keeping capable people waiting.