How to Hire a Front-end Developer
As one of the fastest-growing specialties in software engineering, finding the right front-end developers for your project can be quite challenging. Because front-end developers work on user-facing elements, the decisions they make and patterns they implement can have a huge impact on how your users interact with your applications.
But front-end developers are a critical hire: all types of apps require this type of development and therefore require developers with this skill set. Here’s what you need to know in order to find the best developers for your next project.
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Evaluating a Front-end Developer’s Non-Technical Skills
Critical Thinking and Curiosity
In our experience, the ability to quickly learn new technologies, tools and approaches to development is one of the most important skills any software developer should possess, but this is especially true in front-end developers.
Front-end is arguably the most dynamic specialization of software development. A front-end developer can go to sleep every night knowing all the frameworks out there, only to have a stack of new things to learn by the time they wake up. That’s because of the pace of change in front-end development: tooling, libraries, best practices, and even architecture changes at a much faster pace than other specialties.
Therefore, it’s critical your front-end developers enjoy learning and keeping up with trends. At the same time, they should be able to assess the pros and cons of new and existing technologies, both helping to provide technical direction and take ownership of their decisions.
The ability to critically assess what they learn is a core component of a front-end developers’ learning experience. It’s easy to be tempted and chase shiny new technology, but that doesn’t always equate to the best overall choice. A great developer will weigh the business goals, developer experience and user experience before making decisions. For instance, a new framework may provide better performance and user experience, but if few developers know how to use it, betting on it could make it much harder to find talent. What’s more, if it fails to achieve popularity, it can turn every line of code into technical debt.