You want someone who can architect distributed systems, design a CI/CD pipeline from scratch, mentor three juniors, and own the entire payments infrastructure. Cool. The budget says "junior with React."
Every time, the job description reads like they want a staff engineer who moonlights as a DevOps wizard and has opinions about database sharding. Then you get to the salary section and it says "competitive" which is corporate speak for "we Googled the median and subtracted 30%."
My favorite part is when they list 15 technologies in the requirements and then say "we value culture fit." Brother, underpaying people is the culture.
A 10x developer costs money. Someone who can rebuild your entire platform in six months while being on-call every other weekend exists, but they need real pay. Equity in a pre-seed startup and pizza Fridays will not cover it.
If you pay for 0.5x, you get 0.5x. Then you complain on LinkedIn that "nobody wants to work anymore" when people do not want to work for you at that price.
Stop writing job posts that read like a Marvel crossover event and start writing checks that match.