How To Hire a Developer When You Are Not Technical

Startups.com
Aug 8, 2017 · 3 min read

Written by Irene Ryabaya // Also shared on Startups.co.

Have a great startup idea? Great! Now you need someone to build it. If you are not technical and don’t want to learn to code, how do you hire a great developer to build your MVP?

For many people the process of hiring the first tech person to build your early-stage startup can be very intimidating but it doesn’t have to be. During my time coding risk systems on Wall Street, I interviewed hundreds of developers for a spot on our team. Below are five things to look for in a promising candidate.

1. LOOK FOR A PERSON EXCITED ABOUT SOLVING BIG CHALLENGES.

Ask your candidate what was the biggest challenge she faced in her last few projects. If the answer involves anything about finishing the project on time, dealing with difficult clients or having to rewrite “crappy” code, you can end the interview right there. These all are issues developers face, but the best ones take all these in stride.

You want to hire a person who is excited about solving really hard problems for your business, so what you are looking are answers like “we got 10,000 users in one day from an article and it was a challenge to make sure our back end could handle it. This is how I made it work…” or “once we finished the Beta we realized we completely misunderstood our target user and I had to completely change the database structure. This is how I got a new version out in two weeks…”

2. LOOK FOR TECHNICAL ANSWERS TO PRODUCT QUESTIONS

Tell the candidate about a problem you are facing with your app or website and ask her to propose a technical solution. If this person starts telling you what features to add or improvements to the design, ask her for an answer only a techie can give. While it’s important to have a business minded developer who understands your customer, in a small startup, the product is the founders’ job. The technical talent you pay for should be exactly that — technical.

The technical person you are hiring needs to worry about setting up your database and maintaining your servers to make sure you can scale, building a code base that is very easy to change when you learn what your users love and hate about your MVP and helping you decide the best way to build a great product quickly and cost effectively. A great answer could be “Building feature A is really easy for me but feature B is actually quite technically challenging. Here is a way to do a version of feature B which is quick for me to code and might feel the same to your users.”

CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING >>>>>

Got an interesting story? Awesome. Send it our way!

If you dig our stuff, please hit that little ♥ to spread the word.

Startups.com

Startups.com

Written by

We're the world's largest startup launch platform: @Fundable + @LaunchRock + @Zirtual + @getmoreclarity + @bizplan_

Startups.com

Amazing content for Startup Founders, by Startup Founders.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade