The Real Cost of a Bad Technical Hire

Everyone agrees a bad technical hire is expensive. Almost nobody puts a number on it before the next req goes out.

Start with the obvious: salary paid during the ramp, plus the recruiter and interviewer hours that produced the wrong yes. Then add the part people skip — the senior engineers who now spend their week reviewing, correcting, and unblocking someone who cannot carry their own load.

That senior time is the real cost. At a fully loaded rate, a handful of hours a week for a couple of quarters dwarfs the salary line. And it compounds: the roadmap slips, the good engineers get frustrated, and attrition risk creeps up.

The lever is screening, not heroics after the fact. A structured interview that produces a real signal — not a coding-puzzle score — catches the mismatch before it costs you two quarters of senior attention.

If you want the arithmetic for your own team, the calculator on this site runs the same model with your numbers.