Yep, and a mis-hire is one of the easiest problems to push off. You can talk yourself into believing the first project wasn't a good fit, your management skills

Yep, and a mis-hire is one of the easiest problems to push off. You can talk yourself into believing the first project wasn't a good fit, your management skills aren't good so it's your fault, and so on. All of those things might even be true! But doesn't change the reality that you're burning 2-3 engineers of runway on 1 engineer with no valuable outputs.