Reality of hiring and expansion

Posted by steve on May 19, 2007 |

This past week, Microsoft’s Mac development team announced that a real document converter, that will allow old versions of Office users to convert to new versions of Office 2007 format, will not be released until after Mac Office 2008 is complete. It was a choice of using existing resources to focus on releasing Office 2008 for Mac on schedule, rather than delaying it to get the converter out.

A few weeks prior, Apple made a similar announcement in regards to OS X. In order to get iPhone delivered and out on the market on time, they had to shift resouces from the OS X team to work on the iPhone. Therefore, they had to delay the release of OS X until after iPhone.

The general reaction to both of these events are about the same, although Apple’s announcement created a much more visible ripple through news coverage (and understandably so). Most people would think, a company with the size, resource as Microsoft and Apple, shouldn’t have any issues simply pulling in new resources and get the software released on time. Having gone through the responsibilities of finding new hire and contractors myself, I can sympathize with the difficulty of simply bringing in new resources. It’s never as easy as finding qualified people and bringing them in.

Besides the process of finding and filtering through the number of talents out there available, you have to find the one that culturally fits into the company’s general atmosphere. That process in itself can take more than a few weeks. Multiple interviews are scheduled with each interviewee, each person in the process will take up at least half of a work day. If you were lucky enough to find someone who is equally qualified in both skill set and personality (usually you end up with more of one, or not enough of the other), it will take anywhere between a week to a month to integrate the new hire into the processes of your workflow.

All in all, for just one new hire into an established team, you’re looking at a hiring and development cycle that ranges anywhere between 3 weeks to 2 months. Not to mention that getting the new hire attuned, probably takes attention and time away from the rest of your team. By the time that new hire is an active, autonomously contributing member of your team, you’re looking at 2 months down the road.

This situation is even worse when you’re dealing with short-term hires to finish specific projects. You need to ramp them up to speed to finish the project on time, then after the project is done, you have to figure out if the long term plan of your company justifies keeping that person on tab. The obvious solution is to not make any permanent hires, and simply contract out the work. However, the process of finding a contractor, and maintaining the relationship with the contractor isn’t any easier than finding a permanent hire.

It’s easy to criticize these companies for not expanding resources to get their products out on time. The question is, would you rather put up with shoddy quality on the final product because of improper resource expansion? Under the same situation, I would always choose to maintain the quality of the product, rather than the schedule of the product.

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