HACKER Q&A
📣 rurai

Is anybody else having trouble finding senior developers?


I've had a few discussions over the past week with people looking to hire senior developers and have been struggling to find suitable candidates. Most of the applications we've been seeing are from people who have 5+ years of experience repeatedly developing the same product on 6 month or 1 year cycles. We all agreed that we're not seeing the multi-disciplinary candidates that we used to see before the pandemic.

Is it just an anomaly we're seeing or is this industry wide?

  👤 pitched Accepted Answer ✓
All of the more senior engineers I know who have kids are taking a break right now. The pandemic means that both work and family need more time than normal. I think it’s about 25% more time needed on the job for same results and about 50% more time needed with kids. There isn’t enough time in one day to do both so a lot of people are off the market for a bit longer. I’m one of those!

For the more senior people without kids, what I’m hearing is that shifting to remote means spending more time with the “less-fun” people on the team because it’s harder for them to hide. So everyone’s closer to burnout and I bet more than normal are taking breaks to recharge.

👤 nibsfive
We stopped having this issue when we raised comp 50%. Worth a shot.