Last month, I wrote about certifications and now would like to touch on a tangentially related topic: Interviews. Interviewing developers can be tricky. Unlike some other fields, people can learn enough about coding to make their way through a basic screening, leaving you hiring someone who doesn’t work out in the end.

There will come a time when you will need to add to your team. This can be due to a team member leaving, the workload becoming more than your team can handle, or because you want to expand what your team does. In any of those cases, you will need to start the arduous task of finding someone new to bring to your team.

All jobs come with a salary, and that salary is usually tied to a simple concept: Supply and Demand. Yes, it’s often the case that jobs that pay more, require much more intensive training that whittles out all but the most die-hard people, but that itself is a limiting factor of supply.

The need to onboard new hires is a significant reason why adding workers to a project does not actually increase the project’s productivity. The goal of any new hire, even ones where you aren’t trying to fill in gaps during emergencies, is to get new hires as productive as possible as quickly as possible.