Episode 479: Contractors to the rescue and dinged for delay

29 snips

Sep 22, 2025

In a chaotic project scenario, a developer grapples with performance issues and team burnout as rapid contractor hiring complicates the timeline. The hosts dive into the Mythical Man-Month, exploring how adding workers can actually slow progress. They share strategies for managing team stress and improving communication. Additionally, they provide insights on navigating difficult manager reviews and overcoming compliance hurdles. It's a blend of tech chaos and practical advice that resonates with anyone facing project challenges.

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INSIGHT

More People Can Make A Project Later

Adding more engineers to a late project usually increases overhead and slows progress.
Communication and ramp-up costs can outweigh the added person-hours.

ADVICE

Cut Scope Or Move The Date

If a project is late, choose between cutting scope or pushing the deadline.
Adding contractors rarely fixes a late project because of ramp-up and integration costs.

ADVICE

Rank Features And Draw A Deadline Line

Ask your CTO why the deadline is fixed and rank features by importance against that date.
Draw a line at the deadline and decide what must ship versus what can be removed.

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In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Hey skillet nation, long time skilletee first time skilleter here. I started at a scale up about 6 months ago and recently, I was asked to help with a project that was greatly behind schedule. The folks responsible for the original system are no longer at the company, and the team currently attempting to get it over the finish line have struggled greatly. The codebase is full of performance issues and the infrastructure was not set up to scale. Basically things are bad.

Since joining, I’ve helped draft a plan to fix most of the performance issues, and then incrementally improve the architecture. Things are going great, except for the fact that we’re 6 weeks out from our deadline with a burnt out dev team.

To resolve this, our CTO hast started to rapidly hire contractors to “help out”. As one might expect, this has only slowed us down. But our CTO, lacking trust in the previous team, has found the promises of the contractors very alluring. I, on the other hand, don’t love the idea of building this greenfield system with temporary workers and then dropping it on an already burnt out team to maintain.

Am I overreacting? How would yall handle this scenario? How can I convince our CTO that “the mythical man month” still applies here, regardless of what the contracting company says?
Listener k pop demon hunters asks,

Hello! I’m a senior engineer in a big tech company. I recently got a bad annual review from my manager due to the fact that I caused a delay happened in my last project. It was a compliance process involving multiple stakeholders and one of them didn’t give me an immediate approval for the step they owned. I promptly updated my submission for review after I got the initial feedback, pinged them in a messenger and sent a reminder mail every day until I got an approval from them. I feel absurd that I got a bad review due to the delay of external process. What could I have done this better?

Thanks for the great show. It’s making my commute more enjoyable. Keep it up!