Oh it gets worse. I joined during the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, and my entire department was put on a hiring freeze, despite having plenty to do and legiti

Oh it gets worse. I joined during the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, and my entire department was put on a hiring freeze, despite having plenty to do and legitimate need for more people. So we toiled for two years under a hiring freeze as work piled up - but that wasn't even the biggest problem. As soon as the hiring freeze was eventually lifted, all the managers went nuts with hiring - I suppose in that kind of environment you hire as many people as you can get your hands on since you have no idea if you'll be allowed to hire later. My team of 3 engineers ended up interviewing for 7 open positions at the same time. So in a given day my schedule would wind up being: 4 hours of interviewing, 3 hours of meeting explaining to people why dev work wasn't getting done, and 1 hour of real work (which wasn't really productive since it's scattered throughout the day). I decided to get out of that place pretty quickly - so I suppose a team of 2 engineers ended up interviewing for 8 open positions...