I'm a senior engineer. I'm passing good at what I do.

When I left my last company, I started looking for work in a culture that has changed significantly since the last time I'd looked for work (I was at that company for 27 years).

It was a shock. The naked and unapologetic disrespect and ageism has been pretty crazy. I threw in the towel, after a few months, and I'm now working with a nonprofit, for no money, and loving it. You couldn't drag me back into the rat race with wild horses.

I'm quite aware of the value of my skills and experience. I was actually willing to work for half that, if the work was interesting. I have my retirement set. I don't need to work, if I don't want to, but I love to work. When I die, the coroner is gonna have to rub "QWERTY" off my cheek.

I'd suggest that having a culture of basic respect for folks with experience would go a long ways towards your goal. Maybe less of the "cultural fit" stuff, and the "Draw Spunky" tests.

Experienced people can make things happen, which is what we are really after. I ran a shop with experienced C++ programmers for 25 years, and got used to doing really difficult stuff, and regularly shipping our work. One of the shocks I encountered was how rare that kind of thing is.

Many folks in the consultant market are there, because no one wants them as employees, or insist on treating them badly, when they are employees. These are folks that can write their own tickets. They don't need to be treated badly, and would often drop their gigs in a heartbeat, if they found a culture that valued and respected them.

Here's a suggestion: Hire them at market rate. Make their experience with you a joy. Down the road, say "We can't afford to keep paying you this rate, but we'd be beyond honored to have you on our staff at half that rate."

You'd be surprised. I got one of my best and most loyal senior engineers that way.

There's the old story about the retired engineer that was brought back in as a consultant to look at a problem that no one could solve. Engineers on the payroll had been looking at it for weeks, with no solution.

They looked at the system for five minutes, said "There's your problem. Just do this...", and the issue was solved.

They then invoiced the company $10,000. The company responded, saying "You only worked for ten minutes! How can you expect us to pay that much? Please resubmit the invoice with specific line items."

The engineer resubmitted the invoice:

    1. Finding the problem: $10
    2. 38 years of experience, six years of school, so I could find your problem in five minutes: $9,990