10 Lessons from a Non-Technical Co-Founder Building a Rockstar Dev Team

When you don’t have any experience with web programming, hiring developers can be intimidating.

One of the largest issues that trouble startup business owners is how to hire people for positions in fields in which they have little to no experience. Finding the best candidates for the job is a difficult task that typically requires a specialist in the industry you’re looking for.

It may be unsettling to build a development team without any technological experience, but it is not impossible. All thriving businesspeople carry it out. I accomplished it, for one. Sometimes, learning crucial business skills requires a little trial and error.

I want to share with aspiring entrepreneurs a few key hiring lessons I learned while creating a development team without the necessary technical background.

Logic is everything.

You must be able to select and choose the technologies to be used when building the products, have a logical grasp of what they are and the skills needed to create them. The benefits and drawbacks of these tools should be known to you.

We use LAMP, iOS, and Android technologies in the projects we work on, and I always have the knowledge needed to persuade clients that these technologies are the best match for their projects.

Utilize referrals when hiring.
I like to employ the best developers in the industry in this manner. Request recommendations from friends, former and current coworkers, or people you know well in the business. You won’t have to worry about their technical knowledge and prowess in this manner.

You’ll be able to continue building a team of skilled developers with the assistance of strong top-level hires. My original hiring process relied heavily on references, which greatly assisted me in assembling a fantastic team.

Encourage thoughtful conversation during interviews.

It’s crucial to observe how applicants interact with you during the interview to gauge their intelligence, sense of humour, and personality. Your developers should be astute enough to be hilarious when creating a clever product for smart people.

Great product idea + dull developers = clutter product

I prefer to work with individuals who, regardless of the technologies they are familiar with and have experience with, communicate sensibly.

Inquire about real-time  difficulties.
Ask potential hires during the interview about the most difficult tasks they have worked on thus far, how they overcame those difficulties, and how long it took them to find solutions.

This will enable you to understand how they approach, deal with, and learn from difficulties. Knowing the turnaround time is crucial because problems shouldn’t take a lifetime to fix.

Look beyond programming.
Give them a quick, real-world issue to solve, and observe how they approach the analysis, estimation, and planning phases. You can tell if they understand the technical concepts by the way they respond, particularly if they are able to visualise and foresee every stage of product development.

For instance, when interviewing mobile app developers, I ask them to estimate and describe how the Uber app functions as well as how long it will take to create a comparable app. I learn more about their capability to comprehend and use the product rather than just develop it in this manner.

Find out what they know about quality assurance (QA) and managing servers.
Developers should be well-versed in the various hosting-server environments as well as the creation of apps that are readily adaptable to the cloud hosting environment.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is on the verge of taking over the server industry. It enables startups to create goods more quickly and flexibly without having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on infrastructure.

To create scalable, quicker, and more safe products, every developer needs to be familiar with AWS instances and Content Delivery Network (CDN).
The quality of the goods that developers create must be tested. They can’t entirely depend on QA engineers to test the product they’ve been working on for a while.

Don’t just hire talkers; hire doers.
After speaking with hundreds of developers, I’ve come to the conclusion that those who boast about their expertise in app development and mobile technologies in an effort to dazzle you may not always be able to deliver on their promises.

Ask your candidates this straightforward query to distinguish the doers from the talkers: Are you a talker or a doer?

For your team, hire at least two interns.
I advise you to employ at least two development interns despite the fact that you might have a fantastic product idea for a complex product. They shouldn’t be your company’s main developers, but you can hire them if you have someone in the technical lead role who can train them.

Five interns have so far been hired by me, and they have proven to be excellent business assets over time.
Interns are bursting with enthusiasm, vitality, and self-learning skills. In the realm of programming, they are like infants. When the moment is right, they can be trained however you like, and you never know what wonders they’ll perform.

You can reduce the cost of developing your development team by hiring interns.

Look for a favorable cultural fit.
It’s crucial that your staff members can blend in with the atmosphere of your business.

Great teamwork results in great goods. It’s critical to select employees who blend in with your organization’s culture and take the shortest amount of time to adapt.

Look out for full-stack and hybrid coders.
Hybrid technologies are necessary for every effective product to advance in speed, scalability, and dependability.

You won’t have to be concerned about your product’s scalability as your business expands if your developers are aware of or ready to work on hybrid technologies. If not, you’ll need to employ new developers to incorporate cutting-edge technologies so you can scale your product.

Full-stack developers speed up product development and help your team expand rapidly. Five full-stack developers would be a better choice than 10 regular developers if you need to hire 10 developers to create your product.

Finding employees is rarely difficult, but finding and hiring the right talent is what ultimately differentiates your company from the competition. Every new business faces a challenging first few years, so it’s critical to bring on personnel with the necessary skill set as soon as possible.

While it is simple for experienced recruiters to handpick such personnel, business owners without a technical education need not worry. With the aid of the aforementioned advice, non-technical executives should be able to hire top developers who will excel and bring honour to the startup company.