Build vs Buy: When to Augment Your Engineering Team

The decision isn't binary. The real question is how fast you need to move, and what you're willing to trade for speed. A Series A startup in Berlin closes a EUR 15M round. The board expects a product relaunch within nine months. The CTO needs four more engineers. The internal hiring pipeline converts at 2% and takes 47 days per role on average. That's according to Glassdoor's 2024 DACH data, and the numbers have gotten worse since. By the time the first new hire ships production code, five months have passed. The relaunch is already behind schedule. This is the build vs buy decision that CTOs across DACH face every quarter. Not as an abstract strategy question, but as a resource allocation problem with a ticking clock. The DACH Hiring Bottleneck Is Structural, Not Cyclical Bitkom reported 149,000 unfilled IT positions across Germany in late 2024. The number has hovered above 100,000 for four consecutive years. This is not a temporary talent shortage that resolves when market conditions