Recently I became curious as to how the job market is for companies hiring developers. I wanted to look into this as I truly believe that it is more cost effective to train devs instead of hiring new ones. But I wanted to gather some data instead of just relying on my feelings (and of course I'm biased too).

My initial thought was the opposite of what I wanted to find though, that companies would be able to hire new developers quickly (within 3 months of starting the search) due to all the layoffs in the dev world that have been happening recently.

So I set up some polls asking my followers on LinkedIn, YouTube, and X how long it was taking their companies to hire a dev. I gave three options plus a fun opt-out option for anyone who wanted to answer the poll but not give a real answer. The options were.

• < 3 months
• 3 - 6 months
• > 6 months
• companies are hiring?

I left the poll running for a week and we now have the results.

I got 117 responders to the poll, but 81 of them chose the companies are hiring? option, leaving 35 people across the other results.

Of these 35 people 20 reported that it was taking more than six months to hire a new dev. 10 were able to hire in less than 3 months, and 5 were in the middle.

I understand that this is a small sample size, and I didn't control to size, type, and/or region of the companies. I would love for someone with a larger audience to run the same poll and see if the numbers correlate.

That being said, the response is opposite of what I originally thought, which is that it's taking many companies more that 3 months to hire new devs. And we also know that just hiring is only the first step. Once hired devs are going to need to be onboarded into the company and the projects. This could take a long time as well.

Even with this smaller amount of data I'm more confident in my claim that a company that attempts to train their developers instead of laying them off to hire new developers with a different skillset is going to be cheaper in the short and long runs.