You are not far off. In my previous project we attempted to rewrite a desktop app and we started with a skeleton crew. Hiring for the frontend was tough, we got one very good xaml (wpf / winui etc) dev in the first year. Then, in the middle of the corona lockdowns, for 12 months we kept only getting mediocre candidates from across the world, with no relevant experience whatsoever. Then we found our second full time frontend dev, who only stayed 3 months and once he saw how clueless management is, bolted.

Funnily enough the aforementioned manager experts started asking what’s wrong and why we ‘fail to fill the positions’. We were stuck in the native desktop world product-wise, an unattractive and challenging tech stack with difficult problems to solve, with poor management and low budget. That’s what was up. Now I’m happily working on the backend / web / cloud side of things and I’m definitely not looking back or picking up another tech lead position for a project with non existent team to start with. /o\