A business may need to hire software engineers, full-stack developers and database administrators for its software, website or mobile app development needs. Even the most experienced technical recruiters and HR managers find it very difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff.
The ever growing and wide array of programming languages, OS platforms, cloud technologies, software and DBMS packages can be difficult for any single person, even a professional technical recruiter, to keep up with. Many mediocre programmers and designers can crack most screening tests and rudimentary technical interviews. However, they perform very poorly when faced with real challenges on the job.
The problem is manifests manifold, when you realize that that most businesses are not digital, and their managers and proprietors are not technical experts to begin with. When non-tech managers are faced with this kind of dilemma, they need to focus on their core strengths and make a checklist of aspects that need to be ticked before someone is hired as a programmer.
When you are faced with the challenge to hire dedicated developer, i.e., a programmer, for the job – be it a freelancer, or an employee or a third-party service provider – you need to prepare well in advance with a comprehensive list of bullet points, categorized as non-negotiable and negotiable. This list includes clear understanding of the business, market and competition analysis, user insights, and a list of features and functionalities in the proposed system – software, web or app.
Though you already manage the business and must know everything about it, but I bet that you still have a blinkered vision. You need to understand and clearly state how the proposed system is going to affect your business, your customers, employees, partners, vendors, managers and owners. What are the changes that the new system is going to bring that the current system does not offer.
Surveying and researching other businesses in your industry with software systems in the same leagues as you wish to develop, and the impact on their efficiency, profitability and stakeholders is very important. You may not become privy to all the details of the working of the system but can surely have a birds-eye view and holistic understanding of the overall system and its impacts – both positive and more importantly negatives.
Conduct extensive market surveys and find what your customers and clients need; what your rivals are offering; how much are they able to satisfy those needs; and what are the desires that you can find no one else is tapping at present. To stand out and become popular among digitally savvy consumers is a very tough call, and no one can guarantee a successful outcome, and you must fulfill a long-standing need. But you can always reduce your chances of failure and increase your probability of success by eliminating the obvious pitfalls from the way.
This may sound technical but is not, at least not that much. During your market surveys and research on competition, you will already have encountered different systems running on different platforms, from desktop to web to mobile and on different OS, with their probable pros and cons in different situations. This must help you zero in on the most preferred target platform for your proposed new system. The new solution does not have to be on a single platform but can be hosted on multiple platforms too.
Identification of the correct platform(s) will help you shortlist most important technical skills – such as programming languages and DBMS technology – automatically, as they are mostly bound by the former. This will also help you estimate the overall costs of the project. For example – for iOS only Swift and Objective-C can be used; for Android primarily java and Kotlin; and for web development minimum HTML5+JS+CSS with either of Java/C#/PHP/Python. If your product is going to be a wearable device, then there are additional constraints associated.
If you cannot provide your development team a list of features and functionalities you want in the system, they cannot work on it. It’s like asking a mason to construct a house without a blueprint. Features, if listed in full and in a hierarchy from higher level to detailed, will provide your programmers what to code, how to code and with what will it have to work. Similarly, it will give you an idea as to what kind of earlier projects the candidate should have worked on earlier. If you are going to “clone” a popular solution, say the Netflix for video streaming and programming, and then you can simply say the name and be done with it. Features can be listed and categorized into functional or primary, non-functional or secondary and advance or tertiary features. Primary features will the ones where you cannot compromise even a little bit in timelines and functionality and will be developed first.
This may seem a mumbo-jumbo of techie jargon, but this is something you daily practice, follow and take decisions based on it. User Interface and User Experience – how a solution will look, feel, behave and make the user experience the whole idea. Some bank ATMs have easy to use interface while other not; some mobile apps are intuitive and easy to use, some are not; some software tap into your behaviour and suggest you accordingly to make your work easier, some not. These all add to the over-all user experience and are governed by user interface design.
As a manager one your primary roles are to delegate and oversee the work rather doing everything by yourself. Hiring of programmers should be no different. Hire WordPress developers for their services of hiring programmers for you or seek help from your industry contacts and mentors for giving proper advice. Great managers are not the ones who know everything, because no one does, but are those who know they don’t know everything and hire the best people to around them.
Programmers can be hired in basically three different ways or business models – as freelancers, as employees and as third-party contractors. Freelance developers are self-employed professionals and provide their services on popular and reliable freelancing platforms like Freelancer.com, Upwork.com, etc. In-house developers or employee are engineers on the rolls of your company and work from your company’s offices. You are responsible for guiding them to making a successful solution and providing them all their technical needs.
Let’s compare them briefly to understand their differences and features. We’ve shaped this relative table to help you to hire programmers.
| Attributes | Freelance Programmers | Third-party Outsourcing | In-house Programmer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Development cost | Most Economical | Reasonable | Most Expensive |
| Final Solution’s Quality | Unpredictable | Best quality, efficient and scalable solution | |
| Client Communication | Unreliable and patchy, with high degree of missed follow ups | Dedicated Project Managers, regular updates, structured and systematic communication | You have total control over the team and its work |
| Team cooperation | Multiple freelancers may not divide tasks effectively and may have very different styles of coding making it difficult to integrate modules | Teams cam employ SCRUM leading to greatest level if collaboration and cooperation | |
| UI/UX | Unreliable, flawed, many not be consistent across modules | Professional designers build the wireframe around which the project takes shape and work closely with developers | Again, you will have total control, and may need to hire designers |
| QA | Comprehensive unit testing, integration testing and system testing may be bypassed; user acceptance testing and live beta may be compromised as well | Best QA analysts and Testers make comprehensive test plans before hand and conduct white-box and black-box testing at each level of the development and deployment. Even the developers fix the bugs reported during regular “sprints”. | Once Again, you have total control, and may have to hire tester and QA engineers |
We are here to help you with third-party contractors or outsourcing companies that develop your software product, and most likely have their offices in another country. We are committed to grow latest, effective and practical solutions for our clients. We try to make a good rapport with our clients and help them eliminate any business risks.
All three have their pros and cons and are suitable for a situation and not for others. Whom you should ideally hire website developers is dependent on many factors – budgets, security concerns, project complexity, project longevity, and future plans for the solution as well as the hire. At Raindrops InfoTech, we offer entire development services. We have many developers with skill in numerous niches, and we’ll support you to hire a programmer which will be a perfect choice for your project.