If you’re a software development team lead or project manager, hiring a new developer can be a hassle. If it doesn’t go well, it can not only cost you time and money, but it can also bring down your existing team’s morale and make some surprise withdrawals on your sanity savings account.
This article gives you a brief survey of some wisdom collected from the perspectives of both sides of the hiring coin. The software developer, your strategies, and perhaps most importantly, how the two fit together—these are the sources to watch.
Before you even start thinking about hiring a software developer, there are a few pitfalls you can already prepare against, which we cover in “The Experience.”
Once your organization is prepared for success with a software developer, we look at some potential “gotchas” you can avoid in the hiring process in “The Developer.”
But the bulk of the advice isn’t so one-sided: It has to do with the dynamic between the software developer and your organization, covered in “However the twain shall meet.”
If you’re a software development team lead or project manager, hiring a new developer can be a hassle. If it doesn’t go well, it can not only cost you time and money, but it can also bring down your existing team’s morale and make some surprise withdrawals on your sanity savings account.
This article gives you a brief survey of some wisdom collected from the perspectives of both sides of the hiring coin. The software developer, your strategies, and perhaps most importantly, how the two fit together—these are the sources to watch.
Before you even start thinking about hiring a software developer, there are a few pitfalls you can already prepare against, which we cover in “The Experience.”
Once your organization is prepared for success with a software developer, we look at some potential “gotchas” you can avoid in the hiring process in “The Developer.”
But the bulk of the advice isn’t so one-sided: It has to do with the dynamic between the software developer and your organization, covered in “However the twain shall meet.”
You and the software developer you hire both benefit from the additional screening of a paid trial period. Make sure they understand that you expect them to dive in just as they would if it were not a trial period, but that you also want to use the time for both of you to understand as much as possible about whether they will ultimately be a good fit. Give meaningful software development work and appropriate support, and keep your instincts active as you monitor their progress.
Along the way and/or at the end, have them evaluate their experience in a blame-free setting. Whether you hire them or not, this will be valuable information for both of you, going forward.
The easiest way to get a software developer off on the wrong foot is to throw them into software development blindly, without support. Sometimes, to some extent, you might expect to be able to do this—in which case, it should be made clear before you even interview them. But even then, give as much support as you are able to, because this is an investment that immediately pays off in productivity and morale. (The flip side of this is that if your onboarding is lax enough, even small mistakes can turn into disasters.
Even an expert software developer will need some time to get properly oriented to your environment, even if it’s less than what a junior developer would need.)
Give them a good sense of your work culture and expectations. Give an overview of workflows, team responsibilities, boundaries, and so on. Give them enough information and/or mentoring to get them working with the actual code base as soon as possible. Give them all the documentation you have, and where you don’t have it, use their experience as an opportunity to create some.
The biggest hurdle you can avoid in the software engineering game is undue imprecision. Chances are slim that you will get what you want when you hire software developers if you are not clear about what that is. They are even slimmer if you yourself don’t even know.
Coming back to software as a service, today the same has become the most flexible and common business service model which has been adopted by masses. SaaS is also known by the name- Cloud Application Services. As the name suggests, most of the services are delivered via the internet and are managed by the third-party.
Software as a service eliminates the need for installing and running applications by organizations in their own data centers. Hence, eliminating provisioning and maintenance, cutting down hardware acquisition costs and higher support can be delivered.
We develop Enterprise Ready Scalable Software Applications. Taction helps businesses to meet the emerging challenges and opportunities in the cloud, mobility innovation, and social revolution and transform organizational objectives into integrated enterprise applications. We are a group of highly skilled professionals and have extensive experience in creating innovative web applications that are at the highest level of usability, scalability, browser compatibility and platform independence.
Mostly, though, it’s a matter of continuing to hone your managerial instinct while keeping your biases in check. Does the software developer in question honestly fit the role and fit your team? It’s your call.
