“My guess is the company has incompetent managers. Bringing new people on to a project that is behind schedule and in a crisis doesn’t mean higher productivity. Neither does longer hours.”
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Either of those sounds wrong other than the fact that sometimes a new person sees something that the old hands are looking past but that is a faint hope. Longer hours are all wrong, I spent two decades running my own business which involved troubleshooting machinery after working more than a decade for others including Uncle Sam doing electronic, electrical and mechanical repair. Some of the best advice I ever got is that if you haven’t identified the problem within two hours take a break, have a cup of coffee, talk about the weather, when you come back you often see what you had been missing. If you keep on pushing past the fatigue point you may spend all day looking right past what is under your nose.
I can tell you haven’t worked in software development.