I scaled an engineering team from 7 to 20 while being accountable for what it shipped. Everything I can tell you about hiring developers in Bangladesh comes out of that stretch, one company, one city, one kind of work, and it taught me that sourcing is the second question. The first is whether the team you have can absorb anybody at all.
I am a Technical Project Manager at Exprovia, based in Rajshahi, and I read the code my team ships. Both facts shape the argument below and both limit it.
What is actually different here
The difference is not talent. It is that a résumé here certifies less, because engineering hygiene varies by employer.
Elsewhere, "three years of experience" carries a second, implicit claim: three years of code review, of a senior turning your pull request back for reasons. Here the two do not travel together by default. Years of shipping and years of having your work read are separate quantities, and only one is on the document in front of you. That gap describes an employer, not a candidate.
The second difference is positional: the country's hiring gravity sits in Dhaka, and I was hiring into Rajshahi. That removes an advantage most advice assumes: a candidate who arrives already knowing who you are. The compensation picture is the part I cannot document. [NEEDS INPUT: how was compensation benchmarked for these engineering roles, and what can be said publicly?]
So the constraint is not supply. The signal is thinner, and generating the missing part costs senior time, the exact resource hiring already spends.
A team that cannot onboard does not have a hiring problem
Going from 7 to 20 is not one decision repeated. Each new engineer is a withdrawal from senior time before they are a deposit, and the seniors absorbing them are the same people carrying delivery.
Every hire costs the team output before it adds any. The length of that interval is what you are actually managing.
The ceiling on hiring speed is how many people can supervise, times the share of their week you will spend on it, divided by how long a new engineer needs it. Written onboarding shortens the last term: setup, deploy path, conventions, who to ask. Mentoring raises the first, and it is the only thing that turns a hire into someone who can absorb the next one.
Pipeline, onboarding and mentoring are one loop. Break any of the three and the other two stop compounding.
The instruments that tell you it has broken are ordinary: velocity falling, defect rate climbing. A 40% velocity drop appears in one of my incident write-ups and three consecutive sprints of rising defect rate in another, attached there to delivery causes rather than to hiring. Absorb people faster than you can supervise and this is where it shows first.
What reading the code lets me ask
Because I read what my team ships, the technical screen is not something I hand out and get back as a verdict with the reasoning removed. That is what an engineering background is worth to a project manager: not a second offer, a shorter path to knowing what I am buying.
What is worth buying in an interview is the order someone looks in, not whether they land on the defect. Take a system that slows down under load: capacity is the obvious answer and the expensive one, and it stays wrong for as long as the real cost sits in the query. One of the incidents I have documented ends at an 80% improvement in database query performance, a number that came from changing the asking, not from buying more machine. A candidate who names a cause has told me something. One who says what they would check first, and what would rule it out, has told me more.
Ask what the last thing someone wrote that broke in production was, and what happened after. Someone who has watched a service they own fail is not a better engineer, only a cheaper one to onboard, and onboarding cost is the binding constraint.
An algorithm round would give me a cheap early filter. It is not worth its price here. It tests a skill this work does not use and screens hardest against self-taught engineers, the group whose résumé already undersells them. Dropping it moves the filtering cost onto senior interview time, the resource onboarding also runs on. That is the trade. [NEEDS INPUT: what were the interview stages during the 7 to 20 scale-up, in order, and who ran each one?]
The mistake I would warn you against
Do not let English fluency stand in for engineering judgment.
Written English is a real requirement for remote client work: ClickUp and Slack updates are most of what a client sees. But fluency is a separate axis from judgment, and a live interview collapses them: both get assessed in one conversation, and the fluent candidate sounds stronger. Assess them apart. Judgment against code, communication in writing.
The related mistake is hiring ahead of your mentoring capacity because a contract just landed. Staffing a project with the team you have, then holding the scope conversation with the client, is the cheaper error; staffing it with people nobody has hours to supervise moves the cost into delivery, where it surfaces late and as defects. The price of the first option is growth speed, and I will pay it. The record I am accountable for, 100% on-time milestone delivery on the programs I led, belongs to a team whose shape kept changing underneath it. [NEEDS INPUT: how many of the engineers hired during the 7 to 20 scale-up were still on the team at the end?]
Where this stops applying
One company, one team, one city. That is the entire evidence base, and it ends at 20.
Past 20 the arithmetic changes once the seniors stop knowing each other's work, and I have not run that. Where several employers bid for the same candidate in the same week, the sourcing problem is larger than mine and my ordering may be wrong. In a product company rather than a client-delivery team, new engineers need product context more than delivery discipline.
I cannot yet give you the figures that would make this checkable. [NEEDS INPUT: roughly how many applicants or referrals did one hire come out of, and how long did a hire take end to end?] Until those are on the page, take this as a way to order the problem, not a benchmark.