Your senior developer role has been open for months. What now?

Why the role is still open

If you’ve lost two offers to better-funded companies, you’re not doing anything unusual wrong. Senior developers are expensive and in demand, and a 30 to 50 person company is bidding against rivals with far deeper pockets. The median advertised salary for a senior developer outside London is £65,000 (IT Jobs Watch), and the strongest candidates have several offers at once.

Smaller firms are feeling it across the board. New UK companies created an average of 2.7 jobs each in 2025, about one fewer than when records began in 2017, and business groups point to the cost and risk of permanent hires (Bloomberg, via Insurance Journal).

What each empty month costs

• The roadmap slips. Whatever the hire was meant to build is a month later, and so is everything queued behind it.
• Your seniors do junior work. Integrations and customer tweaks still arrive, and the people who should be on the core product pick them up.
• You become the review process. If you’re the only person who checks work properly, quality depends on how tired you are at 11pm.
• Interviews eat the week. Hiring lands on the busiest technical person in the company, usually you.

Your options while you search

The year-one hiring figure includes employer National Insurance, pension and a recruiter fee. How it’s worked out.

Why a January hire carries more risk in 2027

From 1 January 2027 the qualifying period for unfair dismissal falls from two years to six months, and the cap on compensation is removed (BCLP). Anyone hired since 1 July 2026 gains that protection on the day it starts (Penningtons Manches Cooper). In practice, a rushed hire made in January is much harder to put right by July. That’s a fact about hiring rather than legal advice, so speak to an employment lawyer about your own situation.

None of that is a reason not to hire. It’s a reason not to hire in a hurry because the roadmap is on fire.

Keep hiring, and stop waiting

The teams that cope best take the pressure off the search. A second team picks up the integrations, customer requests and well-defined features, so your developers get the roadmap back and you can hold out for the right person.

That’s what our subscription is for. Embedded Plus gives you two tracks working through your queue, senior review on every release, and a half-day CTO and planning session each month, for £48,000 a year against roughly £88,000 for a first-year hire. It isn’t one person’s hours: it’s a team that ships through your queue, paced by tracks. If the hire lands, you can keep us on the work they don’t need to touch. How we work with stretched CTOs.

Questions