Most IT consultancies treat engineers as fungible billable hours. A name on a rate card, a row in a utilization report, a body to staff against a client commitment. It is a model that works for a quarter. It does not work for a decade.
We built DevCode Professional Services on the opposite premise. The premise is simple, almost embarrassingly so. If you care about the individuals on your bench, the best engineers in the market want to work for you. If you do not, they leave at the first better offer. Compounded over twenty years, those two paths end up in very different places.
What care actually looks like
Care is not perks. It is not the foosball table or the kombucha tap. Those are decorations. Care is structural.
Care means selective recruitment. We turn down more candidates than we hire, and we are slower than the market about it. The cost of a bad hire is not the salary. It is the year of cultural drag a misaligned engineer puts on a team that was working well.
Care means high autonomy. Our engineers pick the assignments they want to take, negotiate their own arrangements with the partners they work with, and own the technical decisions on the work they ship. The role of the firm is to remove friction, not to allocate humans.
Care means the firm shows up for the individual when it matters. Parental leave handled without drama. A health situation handled without drama. A career pivot handled without drama. The drama-free handling of the things that matter is what people remember.
When we founded DevCode, the idea was simple. We wanted to build a company we would want to work at ourselves. Everything we have done since is downstream of that one decision.
Pedro Hansson, Group CEO
What tenure tells you
The single number that tells you whether a consulting firm is serious about its people is average tenure. Average tenure across the IT consulting industry sits in the low single digits of years. Ours is well above that, and the long tail is striking. Engineers who joined us in their twenties are still here in their forties, on their third or fourth client engagement inside the firm, still picking the work they want to do.
That tenure is not an HR metric. It is a competitive advantage. The engineer who has been with a partner team for five years writes different code than the engineer who has been there for five months. The senior architect who has shipped through three platform migrations at the same client makes different design decisions than the one who has shipped through none. Deep context compounds. Selling deep context is, in the end, what a serious consulting firm sells.
The other side of the bargain
None of this works if the engineers are not exceptional. The premise only holds if the people we are working hard to keep are the people the market actually wants. We are honest about that internally. Selective recruitment is the entry condition for the whole arrangement.
The compounding effect is what makes the studio model around DevCode Professional Services work. The same engineers who staff client engagements are the ones who go on to build the next venture inside the group. The customer relationships we build through the consulting arm are the ones that seed the next product company. The compounding only happens if the engineers stay.
So we make sure they stay. Carefully. Individually. For decades, where it works out that way.
— Pedro Hansson, Group CEO