Just a quick thought, since I thoroughly recognize myself in your former workfriend. You may have negociated his pay below the level where he can comfortably co

Just a quick thought, since I thoroughly recognize myself in your former workfriend. You may have negociated his pay below the level where he can comfortably cover mortgage and current expenses. Like many others commented, asking for an employee to be passionate is a real problem. You mentioned thinking with heads over hearts. Very good idea, I would say follow through on it and ask for professionalism instead of passion. Offer a higher hourly rate during the first 2-3 weeks, on condition that the person work full-time and that everything should be automated to the hilt and documented thoroughly. Starting on the fourth week, show your new potential hires how tight of a ship you are running, some will be excited to join and at that point you can better negociate their pay because you have something to offer that most developers want. As a side note, the way I have solved on my end the problem your former workfriend is having, was by making the hourly rate a sliding scale (145 in exchange for working 45 hours a week, 125 when working 25 hrs/wk, you get the idea). I am personally convinced this kind of system will work for you as well since is makes transparent the tradeoff between high development velocity and judicious budgeting. One last thing I want to point out that most developers intuitively recognize: having worked in a large number of environments, huge and small, with distinct engineering approaches / team dynamics is a huge boost to most developer profiles. Working on more than one project every week and being exposed to all that variety is worthwhile, for me at least, when I can't charge my full rate.