You hired a staff+ engineer. You may have hired a tax.

The senior hire who "would love to build here if only" is not a hire. They are a cost centre with an equity grant.

The hook

Three months ago I sat in a skip-level with a tech lead who looked like she had not slept. Her team's velocity had dropped 30% since September. Nothing was on fire. Nobody had quit. She had, on paper, more senior horsepower than ever: a staff engineer hired in August with a distinguished resume and a compensation package I had personally approved. "He is great in design reviews," she said. "He just never ships the thing we reviewed."

मजसवें आतां येऊं नका कोणी · Do Not Come With Me, Sisters

मजसवें आतां येऊं नका कोणी । सासुरवासिनी बाइयानो ॥ १ ॥
न साहवे तुह्मां या जनाची कूट । बोलती वाईट ओखटें तें ॥ २ ॥
तुका ह्मणे जालों उदास मोकळ्या । विचरों गोवळ्यासवें आह्मी ॥ ३ ॥
This abhanga names a specific fact: inviting the half-committed onto a hard path costs more than the additional pair of hands adds.

What I keep seeing

The pattern is always the same. A CTO closes a staff-plus hire. Distinguished background, strong references, articulate in the loop. In the interview they say things like "I am excited about the direction; I would love to help you build here." Nine months later the same CTO is having a quiet, careful one-on-one with their VP of Engineering. The senior hire has not shipped anything material. They keep asking for a different role, a different scope, a different reporting line. In every design review they raise objections that sound intellectual but function as brakes.

This is not a bad hire in the ordinary sense. The engineer is technically strong. They are just not committed to this hard path, at this hard time, in this specific company. They wanted a job at a company like this one. They did not want to be here.

The mechanics

There is a class of senior candidate who is drawn to hard problems but has not fully closed their previous life. Their identity is still attached to the previous role. Their partner is not sold on the move. Their equity at the last company vests for two more years. In the interview loop, they perform commitment. On the job, they cannot deliver it.

The visible symptom is low velocity. The mechanical cause is subtler: the engineer is spending most of their operational bandwidth maintaining optionality. Keeping doors open. Every design meeting gets filtered through a question they will never say aloud: "would I be able to explain this decision to my next employer?" This is not disloyalty. It is just what a hedged commitment looks like from the inside. I have made this hire. I have been this hire. The pattern is the same both ways.

Where Tuka comes in

The abhanga has a line I keep returning to: न साहवे तुह्मां या जनाची कूट / बोलती वाईट ओखटें तें -- "you cannot bear the abuse the world will hurl at us together." Tuka is not being unkind to the sisters he refuses to invite. He is being accurate. Some paths cost the people on them a specific kind of public discomfort, and the person still living in the old world's opinion of them cannot pay that cost yet.

An early-stage or hard-turn company is exactly this kind of path. The staff+ engineer who is still half-anchored to their previous life cannot pay the daily cost of being visibly wrong in public, shipping unpolished work, being called by a title that sounds like a demotion to their old colleagues. They will fold. When they fold, they will not fold quietly.

What I would actually do

In the staff+ loop, add one interview whose entire purpose is to surface the anchors. Ask: "what have you already told your family about this move; what is your current company's counter likely to look like; what would need to be true for you to give notice this week." If the answers include multiple hedges, do not hire. Not because they are a bad engineer, but because their operational bandwidth is committed elsewhere. The kindest, cheapest move is to say plainly: "we will reopen this conversation when you have closed your current life. Come back then." Some of them will, and they will be excellent. Most will not, and you will have saved yourself the tax.

Chetan Dhandal