Hiring a developer in India — what I wish someone had told me

We hired our first full-time developer in 2020. I had freelanced with a few people before that but bringing someone in full-time, with all the onboarding and management and expectation-setting that comes with it, was different. I made most of the mistakes available to make.

This is not a guide. It is just what I wish I had known going in, from someone who learned it slowly.

The skill gap is rarely in the code

The developers we have hired who struggled did not struggle with the technical work, mostly. They struggled with scoping their own time, communicating blockers early, and making judgment calls on ambiguous requirements without needing to be directed on every decision. These are not developer skills. They are professional skills. And they are genuinely harder to assess in an interview than technical ability.

I started asking scenario questions in interviews instead of coding challenges. Not "what is a closure in JavaScript" but "tell me about a time you were three days into a task and realized the scope was bigger than you thought. What did you do?" The answers to those questions predict working relationships better than anything else I have tried.

Salaries are a separate conversation. The market for good developers in India has moved significantly in the last five years and the expectation that good work is available at low cost because of geography is outdated and a bad basis for a working relationship. Pay fairly. Pay on time. Both of these are more important than you think.

The onboarding investment

The first month with a new developer sets the pattern for everything that follows. I used to be too hands-off in the name of "not micromanaging" and that led to people working on wrong assumptions for weeks before we caught it. The right balance for us turned out to be short daily check-ins for the first month, explicit documentation of how we do things and why, and a genuine first project that was small enough to succeed but real enough to matter.

We also do a retrospective at 90 days now. What is working, what is not, what does this person need that they have not said directly. A lot of useful information comes out of that conversation that would otherwise stay unspoken.

The best hire we have made to date was a developer who asked more questions than any candidate we had ever interviewed. Not nervous questions. Clarifying questions, judgment questions, "have you considered" questions. That habit in an interview predicts the same quality of thinking in the work. That is what I look for now.