A founder running a delivery operation asked us for one full-time mobile developer. We had staffed that shape before, and it taught us something uncomfortable: mobile work does not arrive evenly. Some stretches had courier and warehouse app changes stacking up, and then came a quiet run where the real queue was all backend: carrier integrations, rates, tracking. He would have been paying for a seat while the thing actually holding up releases sat untouched.
So we quoted it differently. Backend steady, mobile in bursts around store releases, QA heavy in the days before each one, DevOps thin and constant. Roughly the same money, spent where the work actually was.
The habit we kept: before you decide how many people you need, look at the shape of the work over a few months, not over a week. Very little of it is flat.
If you have ever hired full-time for something that turned out to be seasonal, we would like to hear what you did with the quiet stretches.