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Comment by bvm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

Are you open to Juniors?

Sure.

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