What We Solve · When You Can't Hire

Five months of interviews.
Still no engineer.

The role has been open since spring. The good candidates have three offers, the affordable ones can't do the work, and the recruiter's fee would fund a quarter of the project. Meanwhile the roadmap is standing still. The question isn't whether to keep looking — it's whether hiring is even the right instrument for what you need.

Talk through what you need See how we work →

The real cost

Hiring isn’t just slow. It’s reversible.

The obvious costs are the ones on the invoice: the recruiter’s percentage, the months of your own time spent screening, the ramp-up before anyone is productive. The one that actually hurts is the one nobody prices in — a year from now, that engineer can take a better offer, and the knowledge they built up about your product walks out with them. You start again, at full cost, with the same six-month clock.

For a company with one or two engineers, that isn’t a staffing inconvenience. It’s an existential dependency on one person’s next career decision.

The other trap

A cheaper pair of hands solves the wrong problem.

The usual alternative offered is a cheap developer somewhere far away, managed through a project manager and a ticket queue. That fixes the cost line and breaks everything else: you spend your time writing specifications precise enough for someone with no understanding of your business, and you get exactly what you asked for rather than what you needed.

What most companies in this position actually need isn’t capacity. It’s judgment — someone who understands what the business is trying to do and makes sensible decisions without being told.

You’re not short of hands. You’re short of someone who owns the problem.

The third option

A senior engineer you choose — who stays.

You interview the engineer before anything begins, exactly as you would a hire. If they’re not right, you don’t proceed. If they are, they work full-time on your product, talk to you directly every day, and stay — 70% of what you pay goes to them, which is why our annual turnover is 5% against an industry norm above 20%.

The difference from hiring: no recruitment fee, no notice periods, weeks rather than months to start, and no redundancy risk if your plans change. The difference from outsourcing: no project manager between you and the person writing your code, no blended rates hiding what anything costs, and no rotation off your account when the engagement ends.

Being straight with you

When hiring really is the better answer.

If you need someone in the room — physically present, in workshops with your customers, absorbing the culture by osmosis — hire. If the role is as much about internal politics and stakeholder management as it is about software, hire. We’d rather say so now than take on an engagement that was never going to fit.

But if what you need is a senior engineer who understands your product, ships steadily, tells you the truth about trade-offs, and is still there in three years — that’s the thing we’ve been doing for twenty-five years.

This is part of how we build everything. See our full approach →

Other problems we solve

Meet an engineer before you decide anything.

Tell us what the role was meant to cover and what your product actually needs. We’ll put forward an engineer whose background fits, and you interview them yourself — same as you would a candidate. Most engagements start small, with a first project scoped together, so you can see how someone works before committing to anything longer.

Talk through what you need