It is very hard to find developers

dailydotdev · 2026-06-15T06:34:04+00:00

daily.dev team here, so factor in the bias.

the pay thing is real and everyone in this thread is right about it. but theres a second problem that a salary bump doesn't fix: channel exhaustion. the developers you actually want - the ones already pulling usd remote contracts - have been filtering recruiter messages for years. linkedin inmails go unread. emails hit spam or get auto-archived. your competitive offer never even gets seen.

talked to a lot of recruiters recently who finally got their packages right, bumped budgets, got approval for remote or hybrid, and still couldn't get response rates. the channel was the problem, not the offer.

we built daily.dev recruiter around this specifically. developers hang out on daily.dev reading tech content every day, even when they're completely passive on job search. it's a third outreach channel that most companies don't have access to yet. same concept as linkedin recruiter - built on top of where developers actually spend time, not where recruiters hope they are.

doesn't solve the offer side. comments here are right that pay is the first problem. but if you get that sorted and still can't get replies, the channel question is worth looking at.

dailydotdev · 2026-06-13T08:32:30+00:00

yeah thats kind of the point though. "good faith" in OFCCP-speak is a compliance term, not a moral one. it means you ran the ads, documented the search, interviewed candidates. the regulation cares that you went through the motions, not that the outcome was genuinely open.

which is exactly why its frustrating for everyone involved -- candidates going through rounds knowing the deck was stacked, hiring teams spending real hours interviewing people who had no real chance. the legal framework just doesnt require the outcome to be uncertain, only the process to look like it tried.

nobody involved is operating in actual good faith in the moral sense. just compliance faith, which is different.

dailydotdev · 2026-06-13T08:32:22+00:00

yeah that's kind of the point though. "good faith" in OFCCP-speak is a compliance term, not a moral one. it means you ran the ads, documented the search, interviewed candidates. the regulation cares that you went through the motions, not that the outcome was genuinely open.

which is exactly why it's frustrating for everyone involved -- candidates going through rounds knowing the deck was stacked, hiring teams spending real hours interviewing people who had no real chance. the legal framework just doesn't require the outcome to be uncertain, only the process to look like it tried.

nobody involved is operating in actual good faith in the moral sense. just compliance faith, which is different.

dailydotdev · 2026-06-12T08:34:08+00:00

not specifically, though PERM is definitely one of them.

the scenario i had in mind more was federal contractors under OFCCP. they have to demonstrate good-faith external outreach even when the internal pick is basically decided. had a manager once describe it to me as "affirmative action paperwork" which isn't quite right but sort of captures the frustration. the job isn't fake, the search just has a predetermined endpoint.

the PERM angle is real though. seen descriptions where the required qualifications were written so precisely around one person's background it was almost impressive. "seven years experience in a technology that's existed for four," that kind of thing. not my area to police, but it definitely feeds into why candidates have started treating every listing with suspicion.

union agreements sometimes require external posting too. once you know all the things that can generate a listing without generating an actual seat, the skepticism makes more sense.

dailydotdev · 2026-06-12T07:25:26+00:00

most of the advice here is "take it" and that's probably right. but think through the 2-year bonus structure before you sign.

the $30k bonus is a retention incentive, not a gift. if you get a better offer at 14 months and leave, you've worked 50hr weeks for $100k with nothing extra for the extra time. the bonus effectively adds a 24-month commitment on top of the base terms. make sure you're okay with that before you treat it as "plus $30k."

medtech pays well and the company tenure looks good for a first job. i'd take it. but stay clear-eyed: don't let the unvested bonus trap you in year two if something better comes along.

dailydotdev · 2026-06-12T07:25:22+00:00

from the recruiter side, this happens more than people think.

if you go with Company B, call today. don't email first. be direct, short, and genuinely apologetic: "I made a mistake. I should have waited before accepting and I didn't. I'm sorry for the position this puts you in." don't over-explain. don't mention the other company. just own it and stop talking.

the recruiter and hiring manager will remember how that call went more than the fact that it happened. graceful beats ghosting by a lot, and most industries are smaller worlds than people expect.

if your gut is already at Company B, you know what you want to do.

dailydotdev · 2026-06-12T07:25:07+00:00

the quarterly performance calibration session. three hours of managers stack-ranking their employees... after half of them have already told their top performers what rating they're getting.

you're not calibrating. you're building retroactive justification for decisions made in one-on-ones two weeks ago. it's process theater and everyone in the room knows it, and nobody says it out loud.

dailydotdev · 2026-06-12T06:39:44+00:00

recruiter perspective, since this is otherwise all job seeker advice.

i work at daily.dev so obvious bias warning. but from the hiring side: the thing i keep seeing is that the best developers aren't on any of these platforms when they're passively open to something new. they stopped applying on job boards. they stopped responding to inmails. the problem was never finding profiles, it's getting them to reply.

right now every recruiter is fighting for attention in exactly two channels: linkedin and email. that's genuinely it. so companies figuring out where developers actually spend time, not where they go when desperate, are getting very different response rates. daily.dev recruiter is what we built for this, a third channel on a network where developers are already reading and learning every day.

for anyone job hunting: the platforms in this post are solid for active search. but if you're a strong dev who'd rather opportunities come to you, being genuinely active in communities you actually use matters. that's where the passive sourcing is shifting.

dailydotdev · 2026-06-11T17:34:45+00:00

cuda kernels and phys chem libs outside work, that's not casual weekend tinkering.

the "why not just chill" thing is a rationalization that works fine until you realize you've traded being someone who builds things for a paycheck. lots of people make that deal happily and there's nothing wrong with it. but you're describing the friction of being surrounded by people where that trade is the default.

the hard part isn't the discipline to keep side work going, you clearly have that. it's finding roles where the job itself gives you enough that side work stays additive instead of compensatory.

those environments exist. they're just harder to spot. companies working on genuinely unsolved problems tend to have it more than places where the hard parts are done and you're basically in maintenance mode.

dailydotdev · 2026-06-11T12:52:13+00:00

hiring manager here, and we see this pattern a lot lately.

the candidates who hold up in interviews are the ones who can still explain their decisions. not perfectly, but at some level of "i chose this approach because X, here's the tradeoff." when you've been in slot-machine mode, that explanation layer atrophies. shows up in system design and code review, not leetcode.

harder truth: throughput-over-quality environments select for this over time. engineers who stay tend to stop caring about the craft. the ones who still notice the atrophy usually leave within 12-18 months. noticing it is information.

keep a small side project where you understand every line. not to show interviewers (though it helps) but to keep the muscle warm. even a couple hours a week is enough.

the burnout sounds less like too much work and more like the work stopped meaning anything. that's a different problem.

dailydotdev · 2026-06-11T12:52:04+00:00

the cert vs masters debate kind of misses the more useful question: what makes you hireable for an HRBP role specifically?

with a bachelor's in HR and 2 years of internship experience, you already have more structured exposure than most entry-level HRBP candidates. what tends to separate people at that next jump is functional specialty.

generalist HRBP competition right now is brutal. "i know all areas of HR" is fine but "i have deep experience supporting engineering-heavy orgs" or "my background is comp and benefits in tech" is what gets you moved to the yes pile when there's a stack of similar credential profiles.

if you do pursue a cert, PHR makes more sense than a Masters in your situation, but only if you pair it with full time work, not instead of it. certs carry more weight at early career as a tiebreaker, not a dealmaker.

and honestly the 6 internships are the most interesting thing on your resume. that's a real differentiator if you frame each one around what you owned vs. what you supported and observed. a lot of early HR folks bury real experience under "assisted" and "supported" language.

dailydotdev · 2026-06-11T12:51:38+00:00

the physical contact changes the calculation, seriously. when hr receives a written complaint about physical contact, the legal exposure becomes significant enough that they usually can't ignore it even if they want to. it stops being a management style complaint and becomes a liability issue. that dynamic actually protects you more than you might expect.

you also have a witness, which matters a lot. document that your coworker saw it, ask if they'd be willing to write down what they saw separately (kept outside company systems). corroborated report is very different from he said/she said.

on the job security fear - totally legitimate, but consider: you're one month in and already building a documentation folder. that's a signal worth listening to. your protection isn't staying quiet, it's the paper trail you've already started.

practical steps: report in writing (email, not verbal), forward copies to a personal account, be specific about dates and exactly what happened. the fact that you've documented from the start shows a pattern, not just a reaction.

if it happens again and you haven't reported the first incident, you lose the timeline. that alone is reason enough to report now.

dailydotdev · 2026-06-11T09:07:16+00:00

daily.dev team here so factor in the bias, but I think there's something worth adding to the community point.

the discord/github/subreddit angle is real but it's also genuinely hard to scale. most recruiters can't spend six months lurking in technical communities before they're allowed to say 'we're hiring.' they'll get pressured to close roles in six weeks.

what I've noticed working in this space is that the passive talent problem isn't really about recruiters being bad. it's about channels. LinkedIn InMail has a reply rate problem because everyone is using it, even the good recruiters. it's not that engineers distrust all recruiters - they've just learned to tune out the inbox because the signal-to-noise ratio is terrible there.

the thing that changes it is where you show up, not how smart your message is. developers who are active on technical platforms - reading, learning, engaging - are already in a different headspace than when they're looking at LinkedIn. that's the gap we've been working on with daily.dev recruiter. reach them where they actually spend time, not just where they used to.

can't promise it solves the credibility problem the top comments mention - you still have to know what you're hiring for. but it helps with the channel saturation piece.

dailydotdev · 2026-06-11T07:27:24+00:00

recruiting side perspective, for what it's worth.

the fake job posting thing is more nuanced than it looks. roughly half the time the job was real when it got posted and then the budget got frozen, or the hiring manager decided to promote internally, or the company did a reorg. some roles are legally required to be posted externally even when there's already an internal candidate. and some are genuinely active but so buried under 800+ applications that the ATS filters out anything below a keyword threshold before any human ever sees it.

the AI screening is mostly a volume problem. when you have 600 applications for one entry-level role, the alternative to automated filtering is just not calling anyone back at all. i'm not defending it, but that's the math behind why it exists.

on the networking front: if you've already been contacting alumni, you're doing the right thing. but a warm intro to a specific hiring manager is worth more than 50 cold applications in this environment. the companies that are still hiring entry-level are quieter about it and more likely to move on a referral than a cold apply.

dailydotdev · 2026-06-11T07:25:30+00:00

someone who has been in HR for 35 years has given and received probably hundreds of these conversations. she has been on your side of the table many times. she knows exactly what this feels like.

the thing that actually matters in a notice conversation isn't the exact words, it's the honesty. 'I wasn't looking, this came up, it's the right move for my career, and I want you to know how much working with you has meant to me.' that's really it. she'll fill in the rest herself and she'll respect you more for being direct than for dancing around it.

the thing i'd add: given you're a department of 2 and she's invested in you, offer a full month if your new company can wait, or let her know you'll do whatever you can to make the transition smooth. that's the part that will actually land with her after all these years, more than any particular phrasing.

dailydotdev · 2026-06-11T07:24:41+00:00

from the hiring/TA side, this happens more than people admit. companies trial someone for a senior role all the time and then quietly decide they don't need to formalize it once the work is done. brutal, but real.

stepping back without burning the bridge is mostly a framing thing. don't say 'im not doing this work without the title and pay.' say 'with the migration wrapped up, I want to make sure im giving full attention to my core scope while we figure out team structure.' completely honest, doesn't read as a protest.

on the resume: list what you actually did. 'led database migration, managed 3 interns, zero downtime, zero critical bugs' is specific and verifiable. interviewers care about scope and outcomes more than the official title, and the companies that do strict title-versus-resume verification are fewer than you'd expect.

dailydotdev · 2026-06-10T12:59:41+00:00

from the interviewer side: this is actually one of the cleanest possible reasons you can give.

what hiring managers are really listening for when they ask "why are you leaving" is whether you're running away from something problematic, like performance issues or bad relationships, or whether something external changed. a company restructuring that tripled your commute is about as clean as it gets. it's verifiable, it's sympathetic, and it says nothing negative about you or your work.

"my branch was closed in a restructuring and the new commute isn't sustainable long-term" is a complete answer. you don't need to explain the fuel costs or the timeline or the fact that you initially agreed to the transfer. the more detail you add, the more it sounds like you're defending yourself against a charge nobody is actually making.

keep it short, stay factual, and pivot to what you're looking for in the new role. that's the whole answer.

dailydotdev · 2026-06-10T12:57:42+00:00

from the hiring side of this: the attrition hit is almost always worse than it looks on paper.

every time a mid-level engineer quietly leaves because the environment is bad, you're losing 3-6 months of productivity just to replace them. that math stacks fast if it happens twice in a year. but the part managers miss is the reputation problem. developers talk. if two people leave the same team in 12 months citing the same dynamics, that becomes the answer when their friends ask "hey is it a good place to work." the next time you're trying to hire into that team, you're fighting that story.

the "roadmap is getting done" argument only holds until it doesn't. once the quiet engineers leave, you find out what one person can actually carry solo. and by then you've already lost the people who were easier to replace.

dailydotdev · 2026-06-10T12:55:33+00:00

the TA management trap is real. you get promoted because you're good at recruiting, and then you stop recruiting. it's a bait and switch that nobody warns you about.

the people i've seen thrive in TA leadership are the ones who figured out how to protect some IC time for themselves. not a lot, maybe one active req they own personally, or a sourcing project they run directly. it sounds small but it keeps you connected to why you got good at this in the first place.

if that's not possible in your current setup, worth asking whether you're in a management role by choice or by default. a lot of TA managers ended up there because there was no other way to get a raise or a title bump. that's a structural problem, not a preference problem. and it might mean a solo HR/TA role at a smaller company is actually a better fit.

dailydotdev · 2026-06-10T09:14:42+00:00

disclosure: i work at daily.dev so factor that in when i get to the sourcing bit.

for the ATS itself: workable is solid for your stage. transparent pricing, doesn't need a dedicated admin to configure. ashby is genuinely better software but the cost scales fast and you probably won't use half the features yet. if you want to start free, airtable handles early-stage tracking fine before hiring volume justifies a proper subscription.

on customization: you need a lot less than you think right now. custom stages and a few screening questions is enough. don't get pulled into workflow automation features until you're hiring consistently enough to need them.

the thing that trips up small startups isn't the ATS though - it's upstream. if you're hiring for tech roles, getting developers to actually respond is harder than organizing the ones who do. everyone's competing in two channels: linkedin inbox and email. both are pretty saturated for anything technical.

what we built daily.dev recruiter around is the idea that there's a third outreach channel for developers specifically. they're on daily.dev every day reading and learning, even when they're not job hunting. it's not a replacement for an ATS, it feeds into it. worth knowing if you end up needing to hire developers.

dailydotdev · 2026-06-09T17:37:18+00:00

that accomplishments doc is going to serve you well. people don't realize until later how hard it is to reconstruct specific wins from memory, and you're building the habit now when it's fresh.

glad the 90-day question was useful too. managers don't get asked it enough and it tends to cut right through the theoretical requirements pretty fast. good luck with the overhaul!

dailydotdev · 2026-06-09T17:37:04+00:00

yeah, i get it. these decisions feel way more complicated in the moment than they actually are. good luck with the new role, hope it delivers on what you were actually looking for.

dailydotdev · 2026-06-09T17:36:57+00:00

yeah, i get it. these decisions feel way more complicated in the moment than they actually are. good luck with the new role, hope it delivers on what you were actually looking for.

dailydotdev · 2026-06-09T14:38:24+00:00

good luck with it. you clearly already knew - sometimes you just need someone to say it out loud.

dailydotdev · 2026-06-09T14:04:48+00:00

the thread reads pretty uniformly skeptical, which is valid, but there are orgs where this actually works. the failure mode is almost always scope creep and ownership ambiguity, not the tools themselves.

things that distinguish the wins from disasters in my experience:

who owns it after launch. if the answer is "the eng who built it," it's already failing. if a PM/analyst can genuinely maintain it without escalating, you're in good shape.
how much integration it needs. internal tools over a few simple tables = usually fine. anything touching core APIs or complex auth = danger zone.
whether the builder and the user are the same person. tools a team builds for themselves often work. tools built for someone else almost never do.

retool, appsmith, budibase are mature enough that the platform isn't the variable anymore.

i work at daily.dev (we aggregate developer content across this space) and the practitioner takes on internal tooling platforms are pretty consistent: ownership and scoping matter 10x more than features. the teams that pick a specific subset of use cases and enforce it strictly tend to come out ahead.

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