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What 'senior-only' actually means at Wolverine Solution
We say it on every page of this site. Here's the staffing policy behind the claim, and what it costs us to keep it.
“Senior-only” is easy to put on a homepage and hard to actually run a business on. Here’s what the policy looks like in practice, and why we’ve kept it even when it’s meant turning down work.
The bar
Everyone staffed on client work has shipped production software for at least eight years, and has done it hands-on — not as a manager three levels removed from the commit history. We don’t have a “delivery team” layer between the people you meet in the pitch and the people writing your code.
What it costs us
It means we sometimes say no. If a project needs more hands than we have senior people available, we don’t backfill with juniors to hit a start date — we either push the date or tell the client to look elsewhere. That’s a real cost in a quarter where we’d rather take the revenue.
What it buys the client
Fewer review cycles, because the first draft is usually close to right. Fewer “we didn’t know that would break in production” moments, because the person writing the code has been on the pager before. And a team that can tell you honestly when an idea is a bad one, instead of building whatever’s asked because nobody in the room has the standing to push back.