A vacancy that nobody can fill
The ad went up and the first round of candidates was thin. The second round had two people worth interviewing, and one of them accepted another offer before your second interview. Meanwhile the list of things waiting for that developer keeps growing: the integration a customer asked for, the admin screen your operations team has been promised, the bug fix that someone keeps working around with a spreadsheet.
Your existing developer, if you have one, is covering the urgent work and interviewing candidates in between. The founder or operations lead is writing job specs at night. Nobody is doing the work the hire was supposed to do, because that person does not exist yet.
Why the hiring keeps stalling
It is tempting to blame the market. Some of it is the market, but a lot of stalled developer hiring comes from things closer to home.
- The role is really two or three roles. A spec that asks for React, cloud infrastructure, data pipelines and some machine learning describes a team, and the few people who fit it are expensive and busy.
- Nobody on the hiring side can assess technical skill, so good candidates get a generic interview and drop out, while confident ones get through.
- The process is slow. Each stage waits on the calendar of a founder who is also running sales and delivery.
- The codebase or stack puts people off. Candidates ask what they would be working on, and the honest answer is an old framework with no tests.
None of this means you should stop hiring. It means the hire is likely to take longer than the plan assumed, and the work needs a route that does not depend on it.
What the empty seat is costing
The cost rarely shows up as a line in the accounts. It shows up in other places.
| Where it shows | What it looks like day to day |
|---|---|
| Sales | Deals slip because a promised feature or integration is still not built |
| Operations | Staff keep doing a manual workaround that a small build would remove |
| Your current developer | Tired, context switching, and quietly updating their CV |
| Leadership time | Evenings spent on job specs, screening and chasing recruiters |
| The codebase | Quick fixes pile up because nobody has time to do things properly |
The last row matters more than it looks. The longer a small team runs on patches, the harder the eventual hire finds the code, and the slower they are to become useful.
How we get the work moving
What we do is staff augmentation in the plain sense: developers from SpiderHunts join your team and work on your backlog, under your priorities, inside your tools. You are not handing a project to an outside team and waiting for a delivery date.
- We start with a short conversation about the work that is actually waiting, not the job spec. Often the backlog needs a different profile from the one in the ad.
- We propose a developer, or a small number, whose experience matches that work, and you talk to them before anything starts.
- They get access to your repository, issue tracker and chat the same way an employee would, with the permissions you choose.
- They join your standups or planning, pick up tickets from your board, and open pull requests that your team reviews and merges.
- They write down what they learn as they go: setup steps, decisions, the odd corners of the system. That record stays with you.
- When your permanent hire arrives, our developer can pair with them and hand over the areas they have been working in, then step back or reduce hours as you decide.
If the stack is something we are not strong in, we say so at the first conversation rather than finding out later. If the real problem is a vague role or a slow hiring process, we will tell you that too, even though it means less work for us.
What changes for your team
The backlog starts moving again while the search continues at whatever pace it needs. Your existing developer gets someone to review code with and to share the on-call burden. The founder stops being the bottleneck on every technical decision, because there is another experienced person in the room.
The permanent hire, when they come, walks into a codebase with notes, a working local setup and fewer landmines. That makes their first weeks productive instead of archaeological.
And because the developer works in your repository under your review, you keep ownership of every line. There is no separate codebase to take back later.
Does this sound like your situation?
- A developer vacancy has been open longer than you planned and the shortlist keeps collapsing.
- Features promised to customers or colleagues are waiting on a person who has not been hired yet.
- Your only developer is covering everything and you are worried about losing them too.
- You are not sure the job spec describes one real person.
- You want help now without giving up on building an in-house team.