Tara Fenton

Struggling to hire developers? You’re not alone, the best aren’t on job boards. 85% are coding right now, not searching. Here’s your 2-week fix (skip the 2-month wait): - Ditch job ads. Most devs don’t read them. - Find real teams using your tech. Reach out. - Share stories of impact (“Our last hire saved $2M.”) - Offer big missions, not long tests (“Help scale to 10M users?”) - Decide fast. 48 hours > 6 rounds. The myth: “No developers left.” The truth: Bad hiring chases away the right ones. While others ‘post and pray’, you’ll hire the future. What’s the weirdest hiring advice you’ve heard in 2025? 👇 Drop it below. Best one gets a bonus tip. 🔁 Repost: To help someone avoid bad hiring habits. 👤 Follow: For more ROI-first hiring playbooks.

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I spoke with a senior developer last week who thought his company was making a huge mistake. For years, they had only hired senior/lead engineers. No juniors. No exceptions. Then something changed. They hired four junior devs... straight from completing university. The senior devs were skeptical. Some were openly frustrated. "We don't have time to babysit." Three months later? Those juniors are now some of the highest-performing members of the team. They ask the questions senior engineers stopped asking years ago. They challenge legacy decisions. They learn faster because they haven't picked up bad habits yet. And here's what the senior dev told me: "They've made us better engineers too." The myth that junior engineers slow teams down only holds true if you don't invest in them properly. When you mentor them well, junior engineers don't just learn, they elevate everyone around them. They bring fresh perspectives. They are hungry to prove themselves. And they cost a fraction of what you would pay for another senior hire who might not even be available. The companies still refusing to hire juniors are leaving serious talent on the table. Speaking of which, this same company is now looking for a Backend-Focused Product Engineer. Hybrid (2/3 days per week) in Berlin. If you know someone who values mentorship, collaboration, and working in a team that actually invests in growth, send them my way.

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The fastest growing state for software engineer salary submissions is Florida with a median income of $125k. (Levels.fyi, EOY report). I wouldn’t have guessed Florida. I'm always a little surprised when I come across a profile or resume that has FL in the address. But having spent a lot of time there, here’s why it makes sense: - There's no state income tax, which for high earners can be a big deal - You can drive from rural farming towns to the beach in just a couple hours - There's no snow - The gulf seafood is hard to beat What’s interesting isn’t that it's Florida, it’s the bigger picture trend. More and more people don't want to live in tech hubs, they're optimizing for lifestyle + income + flexibility. Remote work didn’t just change where people work. It changed what they’re willing to tolerate to keep working. If you could keep your current salary and pick any state to live in, where would you choose?

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I've talked to a lot of internal TA people over the years. When Internal TA teams are working with an agency, they just want to partner with external recruiters who are easy to work with. They want the necessary support and not an extra headache. Some agencies will try to bypass the process, throw resumes at job reqs they weren't even assigned to, and make things more difficult. Causing more harm than good. It's is a good way to blow it. Be cool. Be easy to work with. The opportunities will be there if you deliver results and not try to force your way into every opening right from the jump. Getting a contract doesn't mean it's a free for all. Not every position needs attention. You can inquire about other openings but submitting a bunch of candidates without a prior discussion is a recipe for disaster.

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I don’t need to grill engineers about their experience to tell if they’re good. Here’s the fastest, most accurate way to vet a #SWE as a recruiter: It starts with you knowing the role like the back of your hand. If you deeply understand the company, the stack, the roadmap, and why you reached out to this specific candidate… then giving a walkthrough of the startup & role tells you everything you need to know. Because the best engineers will: --- Infer technical complexity from almost nothing (or ask the exact questions needed to do it). --- Picture the product scaling or at scale and immediately start thinking in roadmaps, constraints, and future challenges. And the flipside is even more obvious: --- They assume they “get it” after 60 seconds… and when you ask them to explain it back, it’s generic or totally off. --- They evaluate the product/startup only as it exists today, with no sense of trajectory, scale, or upside. It's simple. Do you guys want to see a post on signal-based sourcing next?

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I’ve seen senior level design positions sit open for 200 days or more. By then, the team is behind on deliverables. Deadlines are slipping. The remaining engineers are working 50+ hours a week, and burnout sets in. In startups, the stakes are even higher. Miss a key deliverable and you may miss a funding milestone. I’ve watched companies lose investor confidence — and even shut down — because a critical hire didn’t happen in time. It’s not just about productivity loss. There’s a ripple effect: • Customer deadlines get missed • Existing staff start looking for other jobs • The market opportunity you were chasing moves on The cost of leaving a role unfilled isn’t just in the budget. It’s in lost opportunities, strained teams, and sometimes the survival of the business itself.

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Remote work is killing Junior Developer careers Senior engineers love remote work because they already know how to debug, navigate codebases, and ask the right questions. Junior developers? They're drowning. You can't replicate overhearing a Senior Engineer solve a tricky problem. You can't replace the casual "hey, can you look at this?" moments. They've traded mentorship for Slack messages. Pair programming for async code reviews. Learning through observation for scheduled "check-ins." The result? Juniors taking 2x longer to become productive. Higher turnover. More burnout. But companies keep hiring them remotely because it's "cheaper" and "inclusive." Then wonder why they quit after 6 months. Remote work is fantastic for experienced engineers. For juniors, it's career sabotage wrapped in work-life balance promises. Are we sacrificing the next generation of developers for convenience?

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For US CTOs hiring their first mobile engineer: this is not adding to a team. Your first mobile hire owns everything. Architecture. Releases. Hotfixes. The whole mobile layer. No tech lead checking their work. No senior to escalate to. If you hire someone who's only shipped features inside a team, they'll struggle. Owning a production incident end to end is a different job. You're not screening for "can they code Flutter." You're screening for "can they own mobile with zero support."

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Lately, I’ve been seeing a trend that needs to be called out. Companies posting Senior Mobile Engineer roles, only for you to get on the call and realize they’re actually looking for an intern. Not junior. Not mid-level. An intern. Same job post. Same requirements. Same expectations. Different reality. Sometimes they don’t even hide it well. You ask about pay and the energy shifts. You ask about scope and suddenly it’s a “learning opportunity.” You ask about structure and they start talking about passion. This isn’t confusion. It’s intentional. The job title is used as bait. The real offer is revealed later, when they think you’re already invested. And let’s talk about the bigger issue behind it. Some companies genuinely believe Nigerian developers have no options. That we should be grateful for anything. That we’ll accept underpricing because “it’s experience.” That we’ll work senior-level responsibilities for intern-level compensation. This mindset is dangerous. Because the same companies expecting production-ready systems, tight deadlines, and ownership are the ones offering pay that doesn’t match the responsibility. They want senior output without senior commitment. If a company cannot be honest in the job description, it won’t be honest in the contract. If it underprices you at entry, it will underappreciate you all through. Developers need to start walking away earlier. Not after three interviews. Not after test tasks. From the first red flag. Clear title. Clear expectations. Clear compensation. Anything else is a waste of time. The market is not perfect, but it’s not hopeless either. Good companies exist. Honest founders exist. But we make it easier for bad actors when we keep accepting confusion as an opportunity. Your skill is not a favor. Your time is not charity. And professionalism should not be optional just because the company is a startup. We can build better systems. But first, we need better standards.

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