No Outsourcing Firm Admits It Has Idle Engineers

Ask any software services company whether they have engineers available and you'll get the same answer: yes, we can arrange that.

Capacity in this industry fluctuates constantly — projects end, clients pause, a team of six becomes a team of three when a roadmap changes. Nobody's calendar is perfectly full, and nobody says so. Industry-wide, admitting to spare capacity is understood as confessing that something is wrong.

Who pays for the bench

Every services firm has a bench: engineers between projects, waiting for the next one. The question isn't whether the bench exists. It's who funds it.

In the standard model, clients do. The margin on billable engineers covers the ones who aren't billing. That cost sits inside the rate you're quoted — present on every invoice you receive, visible on none of them. You're paying for people you'll never meet, working on nothing, and you have no way of knowing how many there are.

I'm not exposing a scandal. This is simply how the model works.

What our structure does with it

We publish our cost structure: 70% of what a client pays goes to the engineer building their product, 10% to the Account Owner who owns the relationship, 20% to the platform.

There's no line in there for a bench. The 70% follows the work — it goes to the engineer serving a client, not into a pool that carries everyone else. Whatever idle time exists has to be absorbed by the platform's 20%, and that only holds while idle time stays low.

Which means that here, idle time is visible. It can't be quietly folded into a rate and passed along, because the rate is published and the arithmetic is there for anyone to check. We can only carry it out of our own share, or resolve it. It's an uncomfortable structure to run, and we chose it deliberately.

We have senior engineers available right now

I'm not going to tell you our calendar is full. It isn't. I'd rather say so than perform scarcity at you — partly because I wrote a few weeks ago that honesty at Core70 is a conviction rather than a strategy.

An idle engineer-day costs us something real. It costs a prospective client nothing. Given that asymmetry, we'd rather spend it letting people see how we work than telling them how we work.

So: a free code health check. A senior engineer reads your codebase — a day or two of their time — and sends you a written report within a week of getting access. What's solid, what's risky, and what it would realistically take to move it forward. The findings are yours whether or not you go on to work with us.

We read the code before we quote on anything, so this is a step we'd take regardless. What's different is that we're now offering it to people who haven't asked us for a quote.

If you've inherited a system nobody wants to touch, or a previous team left and took the context with them, or you built your first version quickly and now need to know what's safe to build on — that's what it's for.

The external talent pool

The 20% has to cover idle time, and profit, and marketing, and the cost of running the company. So our idle pool has to stay small.

What makes that possible is that we don't rely on a bench to staff up. Over the years, on the strength of our reputation as an employer and the conditions we offer — remote, flexible — our social accounts have built an audience of around 16,000 developers. Our people team keeps an external talent pool from it: engineers who already know how we work, who are willing to wait for the right opening rather than take the first job that appears, and who join when one comes up. That pool is how we meet demand without carrying a subsidised bench — and the ones who join enter the same environment as everyone else, which is what shapes them.

The reason we can tell you we have availability is the same reason we can publish 70/10/20: our structure doesn't let us hide costs inside a rate, so it doesn't let us hide much else either.