Mo‘ people, mo’ problems

This is a post from the series ‘Common mistakes of first time managers’

A common chorus amongst engineering managers is “I don’t have enough people in my team to do all the work that needs to be done”. You heard it for sure, I’m sure you felt it at some point in your career too as a developer or as a manager.

But here’s the deal: there are 2 sides of that equation which are the people and the work (I will blissfully ignore time for this). And when you are invested in your project and think that the work all needs to be done, the first reflex is asking for a bigger team.

But I implore you to fight that urge.

Seriously.

You probably know of The Mythical Man-Month, and at the risk of berating DHH I will quote Brook’s law:

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. — Fred Brooks

Reasons are actually quite simple, from the time and effort it takes to onboard new employees to the increased communication load once they are in. If you already feel under pressure, adding people to the team is (at least temporarily) adding even more pressure.

And that is even worse as a first time manager. You probably know most of your team well, but now you need to figure out how a new person works and their quirks and how to be an effective manager with that person. And you now have to manage the interactions with that new person and the existing team. The time you will spend managing the people in the team will exponentially decrease the time you can spend managing the work they do, so if you are already feeling that you don’t have enough capacity, you will be miserable.

Instead, you have to learn to say no.

No to anything that doesn’t contribute to the project directly. No to feature creep. No here, no there, no everywhere. Focus on the important stuff. Be a ruthless editor of your backlog.

Now obviously, it’s easy to say and much harder to do in practice. But if you think you need more people, stop and think again. When your team is under the gun is the worst time to onboard new team members. It’s time to shed some work instead.