Months searching for a senior .NET developer? What to do until you find one

Your job ad for a senior .NET developer is in its third month. The interviews bring juniors, or people asking for a salary you cannot pay, and the good ones have three offers and a notice period. Meanwhile the project is late, and your team is doing its own work plus the work of the person you do not have.

This is not an article about writing a better job ad. It is about keeping the work moving until you find someone.

What the empty seat really costs

The salary you are not paying looks like a saving. It is not.

• Projects slip. The feature the new hire was meant to build is built by nobody, or by someone on the side. The customer waits, and so does the revenue.
• The team burns out. The senior who has been doing two jobs for months is the next one to leave, and then you are looking for two.
• Debt piles up. Work done in a hurry and without code review comes back as bugs, usually at the worst moment.
• Finding someone is not the end. A good candidate is almost always employed somewhere and has a notice period, which can run to several months. After that comes onboarding.

Add it all up, and the time from posting the ad to someone working at full speed is much longer than it feels while you are writing the ad:

1. Job adInterviews, tasks, offers
2. Notice periodThe candidate still works elsewhere
3. OnboardingLearning your system and people
4. Full speedOnly now fully productive

All that time, the work either waits or lands on someone who is already full.

Your options while you search

Option	What you get	What to watch
Recruitment agency	A wider search and pre-screening	Speeds up the search, but does not fill the gap while it runs
Agency that hires out developers	A fast start	You get whoever is free right now, and the price includes the agency margin
Freelancer from a platform	A low price on paper	Quality is hard to judge up front, and some disappear halfway through
External senior a few days a month	Experience straight away, without hiring	Not full time, and needs someone on your side for questions
Overtime for the existing team	A fix from tomorrow	Works short term; long term, people leave

None of these is perfect. But “wait until someone answers the ad” is usually the most expensive of all. The cost just never shows up on an invoice.

When an external senior makes sense, and when it does not

It makes sense when:

• you have a project with a deadline and no people for it
• your team is young and needs someone for architecture, code review and the hard decisions
• you need specific knowledge for a while: Blazor, an upgrade to a new .NET version, performance, taking over someone else’s code
• you need to bridge the time until you hire someone permanent

It does not make sense when:

• you need someone sitting in your office eight hours a day
• nobody in the company can answer questions about the business and the system
• it is the long-term heart of your product. There you need your own person, and an external one can help you hire and onboard them.

How to make an external senior useful in the first week

The biggest loss with outside help is not the day rate. It is the days lost to waiting. This list prevents that:

1. Access on day one. Repository, test environment, ticketing tool, a chat channel. Every day spent waiting for access is a paid day with nothing done.
2. One person for questions. Not the whole team, just one person who knows the business and answers within a reasonable time.
3. A small but real first task. Something that can be in production by the end of the week. Both sides quickly see what working together looks like.
4. All work in your repository. Through pull requests reviewed by someone on your side, so the knowledge stays in the company and not in the outsider’s head.
5. Documentation along the way. Everything the external senior had to ask because it was not written down gets written down. After a month, your documentation is better than before.
6. A clear contract. The code and documentation are yours from day one, and the work can be cancelled month to month.

When you find your own developer

A good external senior plans the exit from day one. When you hire a permanent developer, they hand over what they have worked on, help the new person settle in, and either step back or stay on for a few days a month for code review and the harder problems.

The worst case is the opposite: an outsider you cannot do without, because only they know how things work. That is why points 4 and 5 above matter more than they look.

How we work

ProCoding is a .NET studio in Split, Croatia. We work remotely on Central European Time, so the working day overlaps with most of Europe, and we come on site when it is needed. We work in .NET, ASP.NET Core, Blazor, Entity Framework, SQL Server and Azure, on systems companies genuinely depend on, from calibration software for Bugatti Rimac to a travel platform.

Working together means a monthly block of days, agreed around what you need and cancellable at any time, or a freelance .NET developer full time for the length of a project. More on joining an existing team from Croatia in our article on nearshore .NET development. The first step is a free 30-minute call to see where you are stuck and whether it makes sense for us to step in.