Tech hiring without fluff
or templates

Field report from a Russian instrumentation conference. What Siberian engineering teams want, why local IT hiring works differently from Moscow.

Most companies count the recruiter time and the agency fee. They miss 60% of the real cost — team productivity, delayed releases, opportunity cost.

Three types of agency contracts. Which one you actually buy when you sign with the average vendor. Ten questions to ask before paying anyone.

Polished bullets, fabricated experience, custom-tailored answers to common interview questions. What to change in technical interviews to filter signal from polish.

Four typical CTO failure modes. Five touchpoints that move the needle. The protocol we use with 50-300 person teams.

Four recurring failure points in the final stretch. Why the offer letter is the last thing — and the smallest thing — that matters.

What the Russian-speaking IT market really wants from a junior. How to get into agency talent pools. What to do while you wait.

Mid-sized companies can't compete on salary alone. Five levers that consistently move strong candidates toward smaller, less famous employers.

Salary is not the top factor anymore. Five things that decide a 'yes' for senior+ candidates, based on 200+ candidate conversations this year.

Direct costs: recruiter time, advertising, agency fee. Hidden costs: team productivity drag, delayed releases, manager attention. The hidden side often dominates.

Why job boards stopped working for senior+ roles. The map of communities, donor companies and direct outreach channels we use every week.

First-year voluntary attrition is a hiring problem disguised as an onboarding problem. The patterns we see across 50-300 person teams.

Most lost finalists are lost in the silence between the final interview and the offer. Why two weeks of internal deliberation usually means losing the candidate.

Headlines say 'tech bubble burst, AI replaces engineers'. The reality on the ground is the opposite. Why senior+ engineers are scarcer than ever.

MBTI, Big Five, IQ scores in tech interviews. What they actually measure (hint: not what you think). What replaces them.

Reverse a linked list, BFS the graph, DP on arrays. Why this style of interviewing predicts almost nothing about real engineering performance — and what to do instead.

Six months to find them, above-market comp, full benefits — and they leave at month eight to nothing. Three structural causes behind quiet senior burnout, and what to fix.

Basic code is now written by AI. The market no longer needs 'coders' — it needs Product Engineers. What that mindset shift means for hiring.

The market is flooded with candidates who drew themselves 2-3 years of fake experience. ATS rewards the polished lie and rejects honest juniors with real projects. The mechanics — and the fix.

“We need a developer with CUDA. Non-negotiable.” The role sat open for months — until we found the search was chasing a keyword, not the actual task.

The project stabilised, and the client needed to rework the terms of a specialist hired in a hurry. How to run that conversation without losing the person.

At the final stage a candidate asked for more, and the company weighed pulling the offer. Why that is an expensive move — and what we proposed instead.

Near the end of probation the client doubted a developer’s autonomy. How we moved the question from feelings to facts.

Hiring a junior analyst and assessing skills honestly when any test can be boosted with AI. How to build a screen you can trust.

The client needed an assessment they could repeat and explain — not a “harder task”. How a transparent, reproducible check works.

At the offer stage the client’s position kept wavering. The candidate was left hanging, the reputation at risk. How we held one clear line.