How long does it take to hire a good developer?

You could probably hire someone good in about 2 weeks. I interviewed for my current job at 6 PM, got an offer letter at 8 AM the next day. Most of the people in the company go through a quick hire as well and while there's some bad hires it's more that they're inexperienced/cheap rather than the process.

I've had interviews that take months, but I don't really see the value of this. Why do you need 6 people to make a decision? Why do you need to ask them technical questions when you can ask for their college results? Why do you need to test them for skills they'll use maybe once a year?

I'm not sure if this is an "American thing", but in (Western) Europe usually a candidate that holds a degree in engineering or has a couple of years of experience is enough to be considered a competent developer. Sure, there are tech interviews and the like, but in all my years of experience and companies I have worked for, most if not all of the colleagues I have worked with were normal developers (which for 99% of the tech companies out there means 'good developers').

I'm not talking about rock stars.

Once you have the candidate, it shouldn't take that long, maybe a week or two, it really depends on how many steps your hiring process. At the company I work at, we have a technical interview and a soft skills interview, and we try to have them all in one day (because with the hight demand of developers, we might miss them if we take to long).

Anyway, what takes more time is actually getting the interview, and this depends on the value your company adds to collaborators. For example, if you're a company with great reputation, salaries, good benefits, interesting projects, you will get good candidates in line. But if your company isn't really "outstanding", finding someone that's truly good will take a lot of effort. Bear in mind software developers have many job offers, in a weekly basis.

This is why it's so important to build an employers brand!!

Good developer is highly subjective and often disappointing. When people say that they typically mean specifically targeted candidate. How long it takes to find that person typically comes down to:

* specificity of targeting

* commonality of targeted skills in the market place

* competition for such candidates

Confusing something good for those factors is half the reason many companies stop reading resumes and make poor hiring decisions. A poor hiring decision is not just someone unqualified but also people who are well qualified yet not what you expect or need.

In my case as a JavaScript developer many companies knowingly ship the same kinds of crappy software over and over because they leverage their hiring risks away from writing software to tooling popular tools/frameworks.

There are probably a lot of variables here, for example when I lived in Edinburgh there was a local company that always had job-openings for Perl programmers. I could have applied for it, but never did because their salary was 50% less than anything else local.

Whenever I hear companies struggle with hiring at least a lot of the time the reason is that there are better jobs available in the same city for more money.

Whenever I've been between jobs I've just googled "Sysadmin $location", and tend to find a new position within 2-4 weeks. But if there are five adverts and two of them have low salaries I ignore them.

My experience is around half year. That includes searching for that good developer and the other 9-10 senior interviews which you had your hopes up but didn't match. It's really hard to find a good senior dev these days...

According to our experience from 2 weeks to 2 month depending from the technology stack

Time Price or Quality

Shift the deadline

Pay contractors

Sacrifice quality by either working overtime or reducing standards

Depending on organization the hiring process can be fast and effective.

Same as it takes to hire a bad developer.