We have a lot of recruiters sending us "senior full stack engineers" that dont knoe the language they are most confident in and end up being dev-ops engineers who want to get into coding. A lot of recruiting firms dont know how to to get candidates either

I am not referring to recruiting companies that just send developers to a company. I am referring to recruiting companies that have full time staffed developers and project managers that manage the project for you in the beginning and then slowly help you build up your own staff.

Some will have a combination of onsite developers, “rural source” developers who are in a cheaper part of the US, contractors and outsourced developers but they manage the entire project.

I was offered such a position - the pay is above market but it required too much travel for me now.

Now how do you separate out a recruitment company who has solid experience engineers on board from one that doesn't but says they do? I've seen many of the latter and many founders who thought they were getting the former in the deal.

If you are starting a company, I would hope that you at least know what your requirements are and you could sit down with the project managers to hash out acceptance criteria and deliverables.

And then you find that the acceptance criteria aren't met, the deliverables don't work, and your ship date is hosed. What then?

How is that a different risk than every other project that ever existed - even those led by internal teams?

Preferably for an internal project you have a trusted delegation chain that would catch the issue early on.

Two scenarios:

Scenario #1 - you are a founder with a great idea, you hire a good software dev lead who then fills out the department. You work with the Dev lead to hash out your plan They organize it and after certain checkpoints, the dev team demos progress. As the founder, you are at the top of the chain making sure that there is a product market fit, and ensuring things are going as planned from a high level.

Scenario #2. You contract with a consulting company. Your project is led by a dev lead/project manager paid by the consulting company and they fill out the team using thier own staff.

They organize the team and after certain checkpoints, the dev team demos progress. As the founder, you are at the top of the chain making sure that there is a product market fit, and ensuring things are going as planned from a high level.

There is no difference in the delegation chain or the risks involved.

The main difference is that you are writing one check to the consulting company and they are paying the contributors and in the other case, you are paying employees individually.

The usual retort is that employees have more loyalty and ownership in the company. No they don’t. The employees at your company, if they are smart, have one eye toward thier next job just like the consultanting company has one eye toward thier next contract.

The goal of the recruiting company is to get candidates hired. That may or may not conflict with the ultimate goal of the client doing the hiring, which is to get the job done.

I have this problem internally at my company. Recruiting have crazy goals (hire 30 developers per month) so they push us to accept whatever they can get.

Sure, we can keep refusing the candidates but at some point you have to accept someone to get the job done. Even if you need to double check everything they do.

The reasons for that are too complex for a small post but believe me, there are many.

The post you are replying to said:

Hire a recruiting company. There are recruiting companies that have a staff of full time consultants that will bring in a whole development team and manage the product.

You are replying to a scenario that is just the opposite of my suggestion. The client company is not hiring developers at all. They are contracting out with the consulting company to manage the entire project. The founder is working with a project manager who is employed with the consulting company to develop a product. The recruiting company is doing all of the project management, development, QA, etc. The founder is hopefully coming up with acceptance criteria for the product since it was his idea.

After the project gets off the ground, then the recruiting/consulting company works with the client to develop in house expertise starting with finding a dev manager who hopefully understands the business and the technical and the dev manager works with recruiters to staff up.

You’re not hiring anyone at first. You’re basically outsourcing the entire development project to an outside agency. If you are a non technical founder, this may be the best way to go.

There is a local recruiting/consulting company that has been trying to get me to come work for them directly full time in the role of team lead, I just can’t do the travel right now.