#deciphering red flag in hiring process

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

indigo kayak
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Hi all,

I'm a software engineer with about 2.5 YOE in the sector working in the UK. Recently been applying to new positions while still at my current role.

I've come across a company who's fairly large, but has just started internalising their development process from it being outsourced to external parties for a few years. The problem is they've ONE senior engineer working on software in the company who's been working there about a year and that's it. from the two calls I've had with their hiring manager and the one with the senior they seem ok, but something seems off as the senior had to reach out to management to ask for more people to hire. The salary and WLB is pretty decent though (4 day remote)

I'm not wrong in thinking that this is a red flag to have a large company in this kind of position right?
anybody got any experience with a similar scenario such as this?

worn geyser
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What do you see as a red flag?

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If the company has burned itself with a difficult outsourcing setup (which happens often), then wanting to transition to in-house development is understandable.

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At least they have a senior engineer already. There are fully outsourced projects, without any internal quality controll.

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Senior dev signaling the need for more devs also sounds usual to me.

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But maybe there were some negative vibes coming through the talks?

indigo kayak
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I thought it'd be common to want to expand a development team a little bit quicker than a year in if you're regularly delivering internal projects, over reliance on one Dev just seems common sense to fill in, even if it's not with a full team no?

main negative vibes I got was just having this one Dev do too much, potentially burnout is a factor of them hiring. hiring manager seemed to kind of gloss over it a little, senior seemed fine discussing the stack they implement at the moment, what needs improvement etc.

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I get it for a startup that this may be the case, but the company has more than enough funds necessary to start a bit earlier, idk if that's my inexperience talking though

worn geyser
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If they have outsourced developers, then this developer is not the only one. He possibly works with the outsourced devs as a tech lead? Or are they trying to set up a parallel dev team on a new project?