How Do You Find The Right Developers In A Sea Of Self-Declared Unicorns?
Is there more to a developer than their ability to list their tech stacks?
Finding the right developer for your team can be a difficult and arduous process. A unicorn developer is rumored to be the crème de la crème of all developers. With almost every resume coming through the door promising experience for everything in existence, how do you distinguish the real unicorns from the fake ones?
As a business, you always want to hire the best talent — but figuring out the true depth of knowledge someone has in a particular area can be a hard task, especially when hiring outside your field of expertise.
Depth of knowledge is one of the main determinants of programming proficiency, but there are a few other things that can help you figure out who’s what you’re looking for and who’s not.
Are They Connected With The Community?
The most active developers in the community tend to have a habit of learning and keeping up to date with the latest updates and software releases. This means that they are better equipped at creating code that is effective and efficient.
Connection to the community may come in the form of participation in Meetups, open-source contributions, social media sharing activities or helping out a junior developer with questions via forums or StackOverflow.
They are active participants and treat code as a craft rather than just a job — meaning that there is an intrinsic passion towards programming activities, which motivates them to produce robust software rather than just making things work.
How Hungry Are They?
Programming is a lifelong career full of learning. Things are always changing — new ideas, new software releases, plugins, libraries, frameworks, tools, and updates are constantly being pushed out.
The Internet and its associated technologies are in a constant state of improvement. While all developers can learn how to code, if they’re not hungry to learn continuously then their skills and knowledge remain static and rooted in the year they’ve stopped learning.
A static developer will have a higher chance of creating legacy code for your system rather than a product that is relevant and effective. A developer that’s hungry to learn, hungry to absorb new ideas and hungry to see improvement in systems and methodologies of implemented code will be the real gem for your development team.
What’s Their Self-Direction Capacity?
The ability to think on their feet and fill in the gaps is a soft skill. More often than not, a business will have an idea but won’t quite know how to implement it. That’s why there’s a development team.
The right developer is capable of coming up with their own ideas and suggestions. They are able to fill in the knowledge and expertise gaps without much prompting, and are self-sufficient in their ability to generate results. They should be able to work in a self-directed manner.
Their capacity for self-direction is something that can save you the task of micromanagement. It also gives you the ability to trust your developer to make the right decisions for your business. Their proficiency and ability to create software makes them experts that are capable of implementing your business’ visions and strategies with technological solutions.
How are Their Collaboration Skills?
While it’s great to have a rockstar type of developer on your team, if they can’t work in a collaborative manner, then you are at risk of the project relying on a single talent.
The point of having a development team is to accelerate your project’s delivery speed. But to achieve this, your team members need to be able to work together in a succinct manner — which means everyone on the team must be able to collaborate with one another in order to continuously add value to the project.
A real unicorn developer is more than just their ability to create code. It’s also a selection of soft skills that allow them to communicate effectively in order to produce the desired results for your software.
The Task of Finding the Right Developer
Finding the right developer for your project and team requires looking beyond what a developer can offer at face value.
At SRG, we streamline this process and make sure that the developers building your applications are the real deal. We deal with the sifting process so you don’t have to. Our programmers know how to code and how to get things right the first time around so you end up with a robust piece of software and nothing less.
Co-authored by:
Dave Wesley ~ President, SRG
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Aphinya Dechalert ~ Marketing Communications, SRG
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