Hiring Software Engineers and programmers right now? It’s getting messy.
AI is part of it. Remote work is part of it. And the biggest part is still the same thing it’s always been: most people don’t know how to hire and most people don’t know how to get hired.
So if you’re a founder trying to hire a programmer/developer/software engineer, you need a process that’s simple, fast, and real. You also need to stop relying on job boards and start learning how to pull strong engineers out of the market before your competitor does.
Hiring Programmers Got Weird (And AI Didn’t Help)
You’ve probably felt it already.
You post a role. You get applicants. Half look decent on paper. Then you start digging and something feels off. The answers are polished. The take-home is “too perfect.” The person can talk, but you’re not sure they can actually build.
With AI right now, there are people who hide behind a keyboard. They fake experience. They use AI to get ahead. Meanwhile, great developers are using AI too. A lot of them. It makes them faster. It makes them better.
So the goal isn’t “find someone who doesn’t use AI.” That’s silly.
The goal is to hire someone who can still code when it matters. Someone who can handle it when shit hits the fan. Someone who can troubleshoot, make decisions, and ship.
And if you’re a startup, you feel every mistake immediately. A bad engineering hire doesn’t just hurt output. It hurts your roadmap, your culture, your morale, and your runway.
Start With the Business Problem, Not the Job Title
Founders call me in a panic all the time. They need someone as of yesterday.
A top engineer quits. A product deadline is in a month. Something breaks in production. Now the team is underwater.
Here’s where you calm down and get practical.
Hiring is just business problems that need to be solved.
So before you write a job description, you need to answer one question clearly: what problem are you solving?
If the real issue is “we need to ship X feature in 30 days,” you might not need a full-time senior engineer. You might need a fractional person to come in and get you over the line. If the real issue is “we keep shipping bugs,” you might need someone who’s strong on systems, reliability, and clean process. If the real issue is “the founding team is still coding and it’s slowing the business down,” you might need your first true owner.
This is where startups blow it. They jump to a title. Then they stack three jobs into one role. Then they wonder why nobody fits.
You can’t hire a unicorn because you’re stressed.
Get specific. What needs to happen in the next 30, 60, 90 days? What does success look like? What does failure look like? What do you need this person to own without you holding their hand?
When you have that, everything gets easier. Sourcing gets easier. Screening gets easier. Closing gets easier.
Alignment: The Thing That Saves You From Bad Hires
Most hiring failures don’t come from someone being “bad at coding.”
They come from mismatch.
The job wasn’t what the candidate thought. The candidate wasn’t what the company thought. The expectations were fuzzy. The communication was sloppy. Then everybody acts surprised when it falls apart.
Alignment is key to hiring.
That means you need to be transparent. Talk about the good, bad, and the ugly. Your startup isn’t perfect. That’s normal. But you can’t hide the reality and expect a good outcome.
If your environment is chaotic, say it. If your roadmap changes weekly, say it. If your codebase is messy, say it. If you need someone who can operate without structure, say it.
Engineers hate surprises. Everyone hates surprises. The fastest way to lose trust is to “sell” one job and deliver another.
And you also need to get real about how you work.
Remote, hybrid, in-office. This stuff matters. AFuture Forum Pulse study gathered responses from10,646 knowledge workers. In that data, 66% prefer a hybrid work arrangement. That’s the market talking.
And when people do go into an office, it’s not usually for a quiet desk. The same research found collaboration and camaraderie are major drivers.
So if you’re saying “we’re remote” but you actually want people in-office later, you’re creating a future breakup. If you’re hybrid, define what that means. If you’re in-office, own it and sell it properly. There are great engineers who want that.
The point is simple. You can’t recruit well if you’re unclear about what you’re offering.
“Off-Market” Talent: Where the Best Programmers Actually Live
Let’s get to the main topic: off-market tips.
The best programmers usually don’t apply online. They’re already working. They’re heads-down. They’re building. They might be open to a move, but they’re not filling out job board applications.
That’s what people mean by “off-market.” Passive talent.
This is also why job boards feel so broken. You’re mostly fishing in the same pool as every other startup, using the same generic job post, hoping the right person wakes up and decides to apply.
You need a different approach.
And before we go further, let me say something that drives me crazy.
I can’t stand it when people say the candidate was “in your back pocket.”
No. People are not sitting there waiting for your job. You have to understand their motives, their aspirations, their career trajectory, and what the market is doing. You also need to understand what your competitors are offering, because you are not the only option.
So how do you actually access off-market engineers?
Off-market tip #1: Build a target list and hunt with intent
Off-market hiring starts with focus.
Instead of “let’s see who applies,” you decide who you actually want. You build a list of companies where your ideal engineer might be. You pick a handful of titles that make sense for your stage. Then you work backwards and ask, “What would make this person move?”
Maybe they’re stuck. Maybe they’re underpaid. Maybe they’re bored. Maybe they want more ownership. Maybe they want to build from scratch again.
Your outreach should speak to that. Not to your excitement. Not to your mission statement. To their next chapter.
Engineers can smell fluff fast. They want to know what they’ll own, what they’ll build, and what problems they’ll solve.
Off-market tip #2: Use referrals, but don’t pretend referrals are a strategy
Referrals matter. Some of the best employees come from networks. That’s real.
But if you’re an early-stage startup, your network might be small. Or it might be heavy in one type of person. Or it might be the same five people you’ve already asked.
So use referrals. Incentivize them. Make intros easy. Then keep going.
Off-market hiring means you’re building multiple channels. You’re meeting engineers where they already spend time. You’re showing up consistently. You’re building reputation, not just running a one-time search.
That’s part of why I spent 7 years building our own software for hiring the best and could test what works best. The whole point is accessing off-market talent through network and smart matching, because founders shouldn’t have to gamble on job board volume.
Off-market tip #3: Stop sounding like every other startup
Founders don’t like hearing this, but it’s true.
Most startups look identical on the surface. Remote work. Similar benefits. Similar “big mission” language. Similar tech stacks. Similar “fast-paced environment” cliches.
So you need real differentiation.
Tell candidates what’s actually interesting here. Tell them what’s actually hard. Tell them what tradeoffs you’ve chosen. Tell them what you’ll let them own. Talk about how you make decisions. Talk about how you ship.
The right people lean in when you’re honest. The wrong people self-select out. That’s a win.
Your Process Should Be a Straight Line
Hiring should be easy. Companies make it hard.
They add rounds. They add homework. They add panel interviews. Then they wonder why the best engineers disappear.
I’ll say it again because it matters: “hire slow, fire fast” is one of the biggest lies ever told. You don’t need to fire at all if you hire really well. And if you move too slow, you don’t get the right people.
Startups are competing. If two coffee shops open next to each other, the one that makes faster, better decisions wins. Hiring works the same way. It’s like signing a free agent. Hesitate, and someone else grabs them.
Here’s the clean process I like for startups. It keeps quality high, and it keeps speed high too.
Step 1: Get brutally clear on what “good” looks like
You need a simple scorecard. Not a fantasy list.
What outcomes do you need this engineer to produce? What must they be able to do without help? What do you want them to own? What can they learn on the job?
This is also where you decide the real level. A lot of founders say they want a senior engineer, but what they really want is someone who’s calm under pressure and can communicate. That person might not have the “perfect” resume. They might have the right wiring.
Step 2: Run a tight screen that reflects real work
I don’t love trivia interviews. I don’t love puzzle games. I don’t love 10 rounds.
I do love practical questions that show you how someone thinks.
How do they debug? How do they handle production issues? How do they decide between two approaches? How do they talk through risk? How do they prioritize when everything is on fire?
Especially now, how are they working with AI and what are they curious about. Where do they think their industry is headed with AI?
Whatever you do, make it reflect the work they’ll be doing and expected to do.
You’re hiring for real life, not for a test.
Step 3: Build something together
If you want to know if a programmer can actually develop software that people brag about, watch them do it.
Not for eight hours. Not in some painful take-home that punishes people with lives. Do a short, structured work session.
Pair programming is great for this. You see how they reason. You see how they communicate. You see how they handle uncertainty. You see whether they get defensive or curious.
And here’s something most founders miss.
A developer can “fail” a test and still be very good in the right environment. Some people choke under artificial pressure. Some people shine when they’re collaborating. Some people are slow to warm up, then become top performers later.
So your evaluation should feel like your environment.
Step 4: TAG – trust, attitude, grit
TAG as the acronym: trust, attitude, grit.
This is where you protect your company.
Trust means they tell the truth about what they know. They don’t fake it. They don’t posture. They can say, “I don’t know,” and then show you how they’d find the answer.
Attitude means they’re someone your team wants to work with. You’re a startup. You can’t afford toxic. You can’t afford ego that kills momentum.
Grit means they can push through ambiguity. Startups change. Requirements change. Deadlines appear out of nowhere. You need someone who doesn’t collapse when the plan changes.
Step 5: Decide fast and close clean
The ideal outcome is the best person possible in the job for the lowest cost, the highest speed.
That doesn’t mean cheap. It means smart.
If you’ve done the work up front, you should feel confident. You should be able to move. You should be able to close.
How to Vet Real Skill in an AI World
Let’s get specific, because this is where a lot of founders are getting burned.
AI will make a great developer faster. It will also make a weak developer look stronger than they are.
So you need signals that are hard to fake.
One of my favorite ways is simple. Ask them to walk you through how they work.
How do they plan a build? How do they break down tasks? How do they handle code reviews? How do they test? How do they document? How do they use AI day-to-day?
If you ask hey how are you questions, you’ll get simple, hey how are you answers. Ask better questions.
A real engineer has a real workflow. They can explain it. They can defend it. They can adjust it.
You also want to see how they handle a messy problem.
Not a clean sandbox. A messy one. A bug. A weird edge case. A system that’s under load. Something that forces tradeoffs.
This matters because startups live in messy.
And don’t forget the communication piece. Developers aren’t always business people. That’s normal. But your startup still needs someone who can explain what’s happening, what’s risky, and what’s next. Especially when nobody else on the team can translate the technical truth.
Founding Engineer Hiring: Where Startups Blow Themselves Up
Founding engineer searches are a special kind of tricky.
A lot of companies secretly want a co-founder. They want founder-level ownership. They want someone to build the whole thing. They want someone to take responsibility for every technical decision.
Then they try to pay an engineer salary, with no real upside.
That misalignment ends badly more often than founders want to admit.
If you’re hiring a founding engineer, you need to get clear on how engineering will work in your company. Are people working in pods? How do you ship code? How do you do reviews? Do they need to be in the office, or can they work remotely? Do they need deep experience in your exact stack, or can they learn fast? Do they need AI engineering experience, since that’s becoming table stakes for a lot of roles?
You also need to know what happens when things go wrong, because they will.
A founding engineer has nobody to turn to internally. They need to solve problems quickly. They need to communicate clearly to founders and stakeholders. They need to do risk analysis when choosing hosting, stack, architecture, and tooling.
And this is where resumes can lie to you.
We were working on a founding engineer search once. The company didn’t like a candidate’s resume because it didn’t match the tech stack they thought they wanted. I pushed them to meet the person anyway.
That person ended up being a co-founder with that company twice. They built a team of 30 engineers and helped take the product to the next level.
That outcome didn’t come from resume keywords. It came from understanding potential, fit, and whether the person could execute under startup pressure.
Compensation: Stop Losing Great People Over Small Deltas
Founders hesitate at the finish line all the time.
They finally find someone strong. Then the salary is a bit higher than expected. Or they start second-guessing. Or they want “just one more candidate.”
Look, I’m not here to convince you to overpay. I’m here to get you aligned to the right decision.
If you’re arguing over a small difference, you need to think about the opportunity cost of restarting your search. You also need to think about the cost of getting it wrong.
Workable estimates replacing an employee can cost roughly 6 – 9 months of salary in recruiting and training costs. That’s before you count missed deadlines, churn, and leadership distraction.
Great hires should generate three to five times their salary in value. That’s how I look at ROI. When you have someone who can ship, unblock the team, and make good decisions, the business moves.
And once you know you have that person, you can’t hesitate like it’s a low-stakes purchase. Hiring is one of the most underrated ways to excel a business.
Onboarding: The Part That Makes the Hire Work
90% of recruiting is the onboarding process.
You can “win” the hire and still lose if your first month is chaos. If the laptop takes a week. If credentials are missing. If nobody knows who owns what. If the new engineer is sitting there wondering what they walked into.
Engineers want momentum. They want to ship. They want to feel useful fast.
They also want autonomy and trust, and not have to task switch. Engineers are best when you see how they work best and double down on their work style.
So have a plan.
In week one, they should get access to everything they need and ship something small but real. That builds confidence on both sides. Then you ramp ownership in a way that matches your reality. If they’re your first engineer, give them clear authority. If they’re joining a team, define how decisions get made and how work gets reviewed.
And don’t ignore the human side. We spend 90,000 hours of our time at work. If the environment is draining, people leave. If the environment is healthy and aligned, people stay and grow.
What “Done Right” Looks Like (And What I’m Optimizing For)
At Linkus Group, we measure success by what happens over time. We’ve seen placements stay 5 and 10 years. We’ve also seen people’s careers take off when the fit is right. That’s what I care about.
We have a 95% retention rate on our placements. We can’t control product-market fit or funding cycles. But we can control alignment, clarity, and quality.
That’s also why we focus on being high-touch and honest with founders. Sometimes that means telling you what you don’t want to hear. Employers don’t like to know the hard things about hard things. But the market doesn’t care what you wish was true.
When this is done well, clients feel it. These two quotes mean a lot to me:
“Adam and his team at Linkus Group have helped put key people on my teams over the years. They take the time to understand our needs and work closely with us for hiring at all levels at Cognota. We highly recommend using Linkus for early-stage startups.” – Ryan Austin, CEO of Cognota
“The people that we’ve sourced through Linkus Group not only have the talent but have added to the chemistry of our company. Linkus thinks holistically about the kinds of people that they’re sourcing which is really important to us.” – Kris Hansen, CTO at KOHO Financial
That “chemistry” line is everything. Skills matter. Talent matters. But alignment is what keeps the hire working when the pressure shows up.
Closing: Make It Simple. Make It Honest.
If you’re trying to hire a programmer for your startup, don’t overcomplicate it.
Get clear on the business problem. Be transparent about the good, bad, and the ugly. Go off-market, because that’s where most of the best people are. Vet using real work, not interview theater. Look for TAG: trust, attitude, grit. Move fast when you find the right person. Then onboard like you mean it.
You can hire a top engineer quickly if you’re decisive and realistic.
You just can’t do it with fluff, fear, and a broken process.
FAQs
What is the actual cost of a bad engineering hire?
The financial impact is severe. Industry data indicates that replacing an employee can cost roughly 6 – 9 months of their salary in recruiting and training alone. For startups, the hidden costs are even worse: stalled product roadmaps, lower team morale, and founder distraction.
Should early-stage startups require engineers to work in the office?
You must align this decision with market reality. While 74% of workers say camaraderie is a main driver for office attendance, 66% still prefer a hybrid arrangement. If you demand five days onsite without a clear purpose, you severely limit your talent pool. Be transparent about your policy upfront to avoid future misalignment.
How do I vet technical skills without using generic coding tests?
Stop using puzzle games and focus on real work. Conduct a short, structured pair programming session where you solve a practical problem together. This reveals how a candidate debugs, communicates under pressure, and handles feedback. You want to see their reasoning process, not just a polished final answer that AI could have generated.
What is the most critical trait to look for in a Founding Engineer?
Look for TAG: Trust, Attitude, and Grit. A Founding Engineer operates without a safety net, so they must be able to push through ambiguity and changing requirements. You need someone who takes ownership of technical decisions and communicates risks clearly, rather than someone who just waits for tickets to be assigned.
Why do good candidates drop out of recruitment processes?
Usually, because the process is too slow or disjointed. “Time kills deals” is a reality in hiring. If you have too many interview rounds, vague steps, or long delays between feedback, top talent will accept offers from faster-moving competitors. Streamline your process: define what “good” looks like, screen for it, and close decisively.
