> Do you have 10 positions and 10 potential candidates? Hire all 10 folks, and fire the one bad person; your company will be better off for the decision. Much better off than it would be if you instead overwork your existing team because you haven't found your unicorn hires yet.

Even if you hire two do-nothings and a negative-performing person (consumes half an FTE's day in questions), you still end up with 6.5 productive people. And frankly, a 65% productive workforce is pretty damn good. I've seen lots of companies where <65% of people are productive.

Plus, some of the do-nothing people can be alright with some direction. Sometimes people don't get anything done because they just don't know what to do. I've been on so many teams where the manager said, "we need a person to do X" and they end up with some random person that doesn't really know how to do X. The solution that I've found is to find something they can do and have them work on that. Most projects have no shortage of work that's more time-consuming than difficult.

For negative performing people, I usually give them something kind of busy-work that doesn't involve the rest of the team. They might not be getting anything done, but they also (mostly) aren't weighing down the team by asking them questions all the time.