Hiring new programmers, especially in a small company, can often present a Catch-22 situation. We have too much work to do, so we need to hire new programmers. But we can't hire new programmers now, because they will need mentoring and several months of learning curve in your industry/product/environment before they're useful, and none of the programmers has time to be a mentor to a new programmer, because they're all completely swamped with the current work load.

That may be a slightly frivolous way of describing the situation, but nevertheless, it's difficult for a small company on a tight budget to justify hiring someone who is not only going to be unproductive for a long time, but will also take away from the performance of the current programmers.

How have you dealt with this kind of situation? When is the best time to hire someone? What are the best tasks to assign to a new team member so that they can learn their way around your code base and start getting their hands dirty as quickly as possible? How do you get the new guy useful without bogging your existing programmers down in too much mentoring?

Any comments & suggestions you have are much appreciated!