How not to poach a senior developer

Jorge Castro
2 min readOct 31, 2022
We are hiring in the most unpractical way!

How not to poach a senior developer in easy steps:

  • To be unclear with a new proposal of work. Where? conditions? 🚩
  • Never mention salary until later in the process. Because the time of a senior developer (that most likely is already working) is worth nothing /s. 🚩
  • Start with a “initially you will earn… but later you could earn”. That is a another red flag. 🚩
  • Do some online test where the candidate must remember some programming concepts or write a code by hand. I wonder how many seniors developers don’t know how to use Google. 🚩
  • And hire some developer as simple programmer with no decisions in the process. So, you are poaching a senior developer that most likely lead a team, and you want to put instead lower in the “food chain”. 🚩
  • And I forget, requirements that obviously were written by somebody that is not a developer (and most likely copy and pasted from the newspaper or magazine). 🚩

PS: For some odd reasons, Germany is in a frenzy by hiring developers but, apparently Germany is not hiring developers because they need developers but they need CHEAP developers. Under the current market, companies have the next options:

  • cheap
  • good

pick one of them.

Any lower than €70,000 euros per year is a shitty job.

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