Here's what hiring a senior developer in London looks like in 2025:

• Week 1-3: Write job description, get budget approval, post on LinkedIn and tech job boards (£500-£1,000 per post).

• Week 4-8: Sift through 200 applications. Schedule first-round interviews. Half don't show up. The ones who do show up are either overqualified and using you as practice, or underqualified and hoping you don't notice.

• Week 9-12: Technical assessments. Second-round interviews. Reference checks. Negotiate salary. Make offer. They ghost you because they accepted another offer two days ago and didn't bother telling you.

• Week 13-20: Start over. Repeat process. This time you find someone. Great! They accept. Two-week notice at current job. Then they need three weeks off before starting because they booked a holiday. Then onboarding takes another month before they're productive.

Total time: 41 days median, up to 82 days for specialized roles. That's three to six months before a single line of code gets written.

What you paid: £80,000-£150,000 annual salary, plus £4,000-£5,000 equipment setup, plus £1,000-£3,500 annually for software licenses, plus recruitment fees, plus benefits, plus the opportunity cost of six months of zero progress.

When you hire a software development company:

• Step 1: Initial call. They understand requirements.

• Step 2: Developers embedded in your team and writing code.

That's it. No recruitment. No equipment procurement. No HR paperwork. No three-month ramp-up period while they figure out your codebase.

And if a developer doesn't work out? Good companies replace them instantly at no cost. Try doing that with a full-time hire three months in. You're looking at another replacement cycle.

The time-to-productivity advantage alone justifies the cost for most businesses. Every week you're not building is a week your competitors are.

When you hire a software development company, you get:

• Developers (obviously) - Developers who've been vetted, trained, and managed.

• Project managers who run standups, track progress, manage timelines, translate between business and technical language, and make sure things actually ship.

• QA engineers who try to break features in creative ways, catch bugs before your users do, and verify that the thing actually works.

• DevOps engineers who set up deployment pipelines, configure cloud, handle monitoring, manage backups, and ensure the site doesn't break under load.

• UI/UX designers who mock up interfaces, create prototypes, validate user flows, and ensure you're not building something that frustrates your users.

• Technical architects who make the big decisions about technology choices, system design, scalability planning, and security implementation.

Try assembling that team yourself. You're looking at 8-12 hires minimum, 12-24 months of recruitment, and £600,000-£1,200,000 in annual salary costs before you've built anything.

Or hire a software development company that already has the team assembled, battle-tested, and ready to go. You get the entire machine, not just individual parts.

Non-technical founders face an impossible choice: learn enough about software development to manage a technical team (years of learning), or hire a CTO (£120,000-£250,000 salary, equity, plus recruitment time).

Software development companies like Octogle solve this by providing the technical leadership as part of the package. You don't need to know the difference between React and Angular, or why your developers are arguing about microservices versus monoliths, or what a Kubernetes is and why it costs £3,000/month.

They translate. You say "I need customers to be able to book appointments and pay online." They say "Got it, we'll build a booking system with Stripe integration and send you mockups by Friday."

You focus on your business—the market, the customers, the strategy. They handle the technical complexity you shouldn't have to think about.

Having developers isn't enough. You need processes.

What "modern development practices" actually means:

• Agile sprint methodology (not just "do whatever")

• CI/CD pipelines for automated deployment

• Automated testing frameworks

• Code review processes

• Documentation standards

• Security protocols

• Performance monitoring

• Error tracking and logging

Building these processes from scratch takes years. Getting developers to follow them takes longer.

Good software development companies already have all of this. It's baked into how we operate. Your project benefits from processes refined over hundreds of projects, not processes you're making up as you go.

Octogle’s AI advantage: We have figured out AI-assisted development and are operating at 5-10x the productivity of traditional shops who just "give developers GitHub Copilot and hope for the best."

We’re training experienced developers on:

• Prompt engineering for code generation

• AI-assisted code review

• Automated test generation

• AI-powered documentation

• Workflow optimisation using AI tools

This is the difference between a developer who has AI tools open but still codes like it's 2019, and a developer who knows exactly how to leverage AI at every stage of the process.

The productivity difference is dramatic—MVPs delivered in 8-12 weeks instead of 12-18 months.

Your startup just raised a Series A. You need to triple development velocity immediately. How long does that take with internal hiring? 6-12 months minimum.

With a software development company? You scale the team immediately. Need two more developers? Done. Need a designer and QA engineer? Tomorrow.

The inverse matters too. You launch your product. Revenue is decent but you need to conserve cash while you validate product-market fit. With an internal team, you're stuck paying salaries for developers who don't have enough work. With a software development company, the benefit is being able to say "We're scaling back to one developer for maintenance while we validate." Done. No severance. No burned bridges.

This flexibility is incredibly valuable for:

• Startups with unpredictable funding and growth

• Project-based work where you need big teams temporarily

• Seasonal businesses where development needs fluctuate

• Companies testing new initiatives without committing to permanent headcount

Your internal developers have experience building whatever they built at their previous companies. Maybe five or ten projects in their careers, all in similar domains.

Good software development companies have built way more products across dozens of industries. They've seen the patterns. They know what works and what fails.  

What this looks like in practice:

You say: "We want to build a marketplace connecting buyers and sellers."

They say: "We've built marketplace platforms before. Here are the 6 things every marketplace needs that clients forget. Here are the 3 architectural decisions that will matter long-term. Here are the 4 third-party services you should integrate. And here's the payment flow that always causes problems if you don't design it properly."

This institutional knowledge accelerates everything. You skip the trial-and-error phase. You benefit from lessons learned on past projects. You avoid the common mistakes that blow up timelines and budgets.

We've all heard the story: company builds their entire product around one brilliant developer.  

That developer leaves.  

The codebase is a disaster that only they understood. The entire business is now held hostage and rebuilding will cost £200,000 and take a year.

With internal teams, this is a constant risk:

• Key developer leaves → knowledge walks out the door

• Developer gets sick → projects stall

• Developer takes holiday → deployment blocked

• Developer has bad code habits → technical debt accumulates

With software development companies:

• Multiple developers on every project (built-in redundancy)

• Code reviews prevent "one person who understands this" syndrome

• Documentation is standard practice, not optional

• Companies have bench strength to replace people instantly

You're buying insurance against the single point of failure problem that cripples companies with small internal teams.

You need machine learning for one feature. Your app needs blockchain integration for verification. You want to build a mobile app in React Native. Your product requires DevOps expertise for AWS infrastructure.

Hiring full-time for each specialization:

ML engineer: £90,000-£140,000

Blockchain developer: £80,000-£130,000

Mobile developer: £70,000-£110,000

DevOps engineer: £75,000-£120,000

With a software development company, you pay for the specialists when you need them, as long as you need them. Three weeks of ML work? Pay for three weeks. Two months of blockchain development? Pay for two months.

Here's the benefit nobody talks about but might be the most important: accountability.

Internal teams can get stuck in perfectionism loops. "We need to refactor this before we add new features." "We should rebuild the authentication system." "Let's switch to a different framework."  

Six months later, nothing has shipped.

Good software development companies are accountable to outcomes and timelines. They're not getting paid to polish code indefinitely. They're getting paid to deliver working software that actually solves your problem.

Why this matters:

• Software development companies have a reputation to maintain (you're not their only client)

• Project-based contracts have deadlines (miss them and they lose credibility)

This doesn't mean they cut corners. It means they know how to ship incremental improvements rather than chasing perfection before launch.

Every blog post about hiring software development companies lists the same benefits: "access to global talent," "cost savings," "faster time to market." None of that is wrong. But here's the truth they don't tell you:

The actual benefit is risk transfer.

When you build an internal team:

• You own the recruitment risk (wrong hire = wasted months and money)

• You own the retention risk (developer leaves = project stalls)

• You own the skills gap risk (technology changes = your team is outdated)

• You own the scaling risk (need to grow/shrink = HR nightmares)

• You own the delivery risk (project fails = you're holding the bag)

When you hire a software development company:

• They own recruitment (their problem to find good people)

• They own retention (their problem to keep teams stable)

• They own skills training (their job to stay current)

• They own scaling (easy to adjust team size)

• They share delivery risk (reputation on the line)

You're not just buying development capacity. You're buying insurance against all the things that go wrong when you try to build software with an internal team you're not equipped to manage.

You don't have to become a software development expert to build software. You can stay focused on your business while they handle the technical complexity.

If you're ready to get started, connect with us today.