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> Companies these days don't really come to a hault if they're in need of a few developers

My small company has had to put our biggest contract on hold since July after having 2 senior developers leave in quick succession. We're burning through cash and have only just this week managed to find a replacement for one of them. I've almost gone down the agency route (again) but the fees are pretty hefty for a team our size (3 at the moment).

I'm not looking for rockstars, just someone with some familiarity with .NET MVC.

Edit: We're in the UK, FWIW.

I feel your pain. Trying to hire perm in London at the moment is a real challenge, even with a recruiter. Contractor rates are obscene (5-8x perm). Recruiting and retaining is what keeps me awake at night over and above any tech issues that I'm working on.

What tends to be lacking in potential candidates? Dunno if you can know this if you're using a recruiter, but I'd be curious.

YMMV but numbers of them! we offer good salary/benefits etc, but on the whole senior and mid-level devs seem to be contracting for our tech stack (React/Node) and that's a path I'm not particularly keen on going down.

edit: if anyone reads this and wants a job, I've put my email in my profile.

Are you open to Juniors?

Sure.

Hint: most of them are not contracting because they particularly like the contractor's life. They're contracting because they can be paid more. I think in London the reality is that, if your company is using a new and hot tech stack (say Spark or Kubernetes), then the contractor's rate IS the market salary, as most people how know this stuff are doing contracts. You can find them as full-timers with regular FT salary (60-90k GBP ?) too, but that's more of an exception and a lucky catch I guess. Also, once they figure out how easy it is for them to make more doing the same work, they might leave anyway.

How little are you paying your dev that it can be 1/8th of a contractor?

Even the cheapest dev I have ever met in London wasn't as low as 1/5th of the most expensive contractor I have met.

Ah yeh, sorry, my mental maths strayed a bit into hyperbole there, it's more like 4-5x

How much are you trying to pay your dev that it can be 1/5th of a contractor? It's no wonder you're having trouble finding anyone.

You can hire a consulting firm. There are some great ones and some not so great ones. If you are willing to work with remote developers, you can find some good ones.

Disclaimer: I work at one of what I would consider the "great" ones. No idea about UK work, though.

Asp.Net MVC (Core and Framework) is all I do. I'm in the States, but visit the UK often. If you want to chat, my email is in my profile.

> the market is saturated

Unrelated to your point and this thread, but can someone share some data/evidence on this? (not that I am denying it)

I'd be interested in hard data too, mostly because it seems absolutely true across multiple stacks. In my own experience, junior development salaries have dropped in the last decade and the number of people that apply for roles has increased significantly, to the point where at my last employer we had hundreds of people apply for a .NET role, and not just local people either - people were willing to move for what was a fairly bog-standard role at a bog-standard agency.

This might indeed be true in your slice of the market, but in top firms in USA I think new grad compensation has never been higher. Top students with good summer internship experience can easily bag 150k in their first year, even more for those who manage to time competing offers.

The situation of top students in top firms isn't necessarily representative of the market. You'd want to look at the compensation of the median student, or if you're including the top students, then look at the weak students, say, 20th percentile as well.

Absolutely. That selection of developers barely makes up a fraction of a percentage of the working developers out there across the world.

In the UK, salaries seem to have gone down across the board from what they were a decade ago - even for top jobs.

Salaries not skyrocketing. Some companies in some areas are seeing modest compensation growth for software engineers, but if there was a true shortage of supply combined with steady demand, then salaries would be rising.

The interview process is getting longer than ever. For instance, getting a homework step before the in-person interview never used to be a thing. Now, it seems to have become commonplace.

Personally I really like Triplebyte. I'm 18 and have no professional experience other than a 3 month internship, but I was able to pass their quiz + interview and I got 3 interviews that I'm going to in a few weeks. If there wasn't some way to prove that I wasn't just a rando, then getting my foot in the door would be 10x harder.