Agreed! Our approach with 12 or so developers: no deadlines, code review begins when you are ready. I am actively suspicious of work done quickly. I personally ensure the clients don’t expect guaranteed delivery on a fixed date. Work 38 hours a week. Once every year or two we might need to push something harder for a few days - track how many extra hours you did and take them off later whenever you like. But we try to avoid any sort of crunch.

To get a job you pass my personal, practical, coding test. By practical I mean using an IDE with full web access, Google, Stack Overflow, whatever. I try to hire people with at least 10+ years experience, but the more the better. Some of our best are well over 30 years experience.

In exchange we have a happy group of strong developers enjoying their work and having time for their lives outside of it. This has led to an extremely stable system that’s easy to add features to even after 15 years of evolution. Because of that perhaps it’s actually cheaper to work this way.