The bar is high on purpose
We hold a deliberately high bar — only a small fraction of sourced candidates clear full vetting. That is not a knock on the market; it is the standard. The point is to make that filtering someone else's problem, not the founder's.
Where strong candidates fall short
- Production judgement — comfortable coding, less so with reliability, cost, and trade-offs at scale.
- Testing discipline — good features, thin tests.
- Explaining decisions — can build it, struggle to justify why.
What predicts a great hire
- A shipped project they fully owned — the single strongest signal.
- Clear written communication and async habits.
- Fluency with AI tooling used as a real accelerant, not a crutch.
- Curiosity under follow-up questions rather than memorised answers.
The surprising non-issue
English is rarely the blocker people expect. The engineers who reach a founder communicate clearly — because communication is a hard filter in vetting, not an afterthought.
The takeaway
Great engineers are here in abundance — but only if you filter hard and consistently. Do that, and offshore hiring stops being a gamble.
Methodology — figures are directional, drawn from Edenic's own sourcing and vetting pipeline and general market observation. They're meant for planning, not as a formal third-party survey.