Before You Replace a Developer, Watch One Change Reach Production

You cannot tell whether your developers are slow or whether you hired the wrong people, and you are quietly pricing out what it would cost to replace one of them.

My answer is neither. Watch how a finished change gets to production and you will usually find the ceiling there.

In one organization I worked in (five product lines, around forty engineers, a $1B a year company under IT SOX), change lead time was two months. Code sat on long-lived branches waiting to merge, then sat again in the release ceremony everyone assumed SOX required. The engineers were good, and almost all of those two months were spent waiting. We moved five product pods to trunk-based development with feature flags and cut that ceremony down while keeping IT SOX compliance intact. Lead time went from two months to one day, and the pods that adopted it were shipping in a day or two. Same engineers, same codebase, and honestly nobody wrote a faster line of code.

It holds at the other end of the scale too. On GoFixly, where I was the hands-on fractional CTO for 13 months on a team small enough that I wrote about 40% of the 1,100-plus commits myself, six GitHub Actions pipelines carry every change from merge to a validated deployment in under five minutes. Team size decided nothing either time, and I am going to go one step further: software teams are going to be as small as two or three people. I run delivery on Claude Code across four production codebases, with the standards written into each repository (no test may be deleted, weakened, or skipped), and I taught a non-technical founder to ship verified fixes to his own live product the same way. A team that small only works when the pipeline does the checking a QA department used to do.

So before your next hire or your next hard conversation, ask your team to walk you through what happens between “the code is done” and “the customer has it.” If that walk takes more than a few minutes to describe, you found the problem, and fixing it costs a lot less than replacing someone.

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