How to Hire a Software Developer (Without Getting Burned)

Hiring a software developer is one of the highest-leverage decisions a business can make — and one of the easiest to get wrong. A great hire accelerates everything. A bad one burns months of budget and leaves you with code that needs to be rewritten.

We’ve been on both sides of this. We’ve been the developers getting hired, and we’ve helped clients evaluate and hire technical talent for their own teams. This guide covers what we’ve learned about making the right call.

Decide What You Actually Need Before You Start Looking

The most common hiring mistake happens before a single resume gets reviewed: not knowing what you need.

“We need a developer” is not a job description. It’s a budget line item. Before you write a listing or reach out to a freelancer, answer these questions:

What are you building? A marketing site, a SaaS product, a mobile app, an internal tool?
What’s the timeline? Do you need something shipped in 4 weeks or 12 months?
What’s the ongoing commitment? Is this a one-time project or do you need continuous development?
What technical decisions have already been made? Do you have an existing codebase, preferred stack, or infrastructure constraints?

The answers to these questions determine whether you need a freelancer, an agency, or a full-time hire. They also determine what skill set matters.

Freelancer vs. Agency vs. In-House: The Real Tradeoffs

Freelancers

Best for: Well-scoped projects with clear requirements, budget-conscious builds, specialized expertise you need temporarily.

A strong freelancer can move faster than an agency because there’s no coordination overhead. You talk to the person writing the code. Decisions happen in hours, not days.

The risk: freelancers are single points of failure. If they get sick, take on too much work, or disappear, your project stalls. You also don’t get built-in code review, QA, or project management unless the freelancer handles all of that themselves.

What to look for: A portfolio of shipped projects (not just code samples), clear communication skills, and a track record of finishing things. Ask for references from past clients, not just colleagues.

Agencies

Best for: Larger projects that need multiple skill sets, companies that want a managed process, projects where design and development need to be coordinated.

Agencies provide a team. You typically get a project manager, one or more developers, and sometimes a designer. The upside is redundancy and process. The downside is cost — agency rates reflect the overhead of running a company with multiple employees.

What to look for: Case studies with measurable outcomes (not just screenshots), a clear explanation of their process, and transparency about who will actually work on your project. Many agencies sell you a senior team and staff juniors.

In-House Hires

Best for: Companies with ongoing development needs, products that require deep domain knowledge, situations where you need someone embedded in your team long-term.

The upside of hiring in-house is alignment. A full-time developer understands your business context, attends your meetings, and accumulates institutional knowledge. The downside is cost (salary, benefits, equipment, management time) and the difficulty of hiring well in a competitive market.

What to look for: Technical skills that match your stack, cultural fit with your team, and evidence of self-direction. The best in-house developers don’t wait to be told what to build.

At Ten Peaks Tech, we often serve as the bridge — clients engage us as a fractional development team until they’re ready to hire in-house, and we help them make that transition when the time comes.

How to Evaluate a Developer’s Portfolio

A portfolio should answer one question: can this person ship production software that solves real problems?

Here’s what to look for:

Shipped Products, Not Demo Projects

Todo apps and tutorial clones don’t tell you anything. Look for real applications that are live, serving users, and handling production concerns like authentication, payments, error handling, and performance.

Technical Decision-Making

Good developers don’t just write code — they make tradeoffs. Ask why they chose a specific tech stack, how they handled a particular constraint, or what they would do differently. The quality of their reasoning matters more than the specific technologies they used.

Code Quality (If You Can Assess It)

If the developer has public repositories, look at their code. Specifically look for:

Consistent patterns. Does the code follow a recognizable structure, or is every file organized differently?
Error handling. Does the code account for things going wrong, or does it only handle the happy path?
Naming. Are variables and functions named clearly, or do you need a decoder ring?
Tests. Is there any evidence of testing, even if it’s not comprehensive?

If you can’t evaluate code quality yourself, hire a technical advisor to review it. An hour of a senior developer’s time to evaluate a candidate’s code is one of the highest-ROI investments you can make.

Questions to Ask During the Interview

Skip the algorithm puzzles. Here are questions that actually reveal whether someone can do the job:

“Walk me through a project you shipped from start to finish.”

This reveals how they think about scoping, architecture, tradeoffs, and delivery. Listen for specifics — vague answers usually mean vague involvement.

”Tell me about a time something went wrong in production. What happened and what did you do?”

Every experienced developer has war stories. How they respond to failure tells you more than how they describe success. Look for ownership, structured debugging, and follow-through (e.g., “we added monitoring to catch it earlier next time”).

”How would you approach building [your specific project]?”

Describe your project in two sentences and ask how they’d approach it. You’re not looking for a perfect architecture — you’re looking for the right questions. Good developers ask clarifying questions before proposing solutions.

”What would you push back on if a client asked for it?”

This is a trust question. You want someone who will tell you when an idea is expensive, unnecessary, or technically risky — not someone who says yes to everything and delivers a mess.

Red Flags That Should Stop the Conversation

Over the years, we’ve compiled a reliable list of warning signs:

No questions about your business. A developer who doesn’t ask about your goals, users, or constraints is going to build the wrong thing.
“I can build anything.” Specialization is a feature, not a limitation. Generalists who claim expertise in everything usually have depth in nothing.
No timeline or scope discussion. If someone quotes a price without understanding what you need, that price is meaningless.
Resistance to showing previous work. NDAs exist, but a developer should be able to describe past projects in general terms and show you something.
Unusually low rates. Software development has a market rate. If someone is dramatically cheaper than everyone else, there’s a reason. Often it’s because they’re learning on your dime, or they’ll cut corners to hit a price point that doesn’t support quality work.
No process for handling changes. Every project has scope changes. A developer who doesn’t have a clear process for handling them is going to create conflict when they inevitably happen.

What About Technical Assessments?

We’re not fans of whiteboard interviews or timed coding challenges for most hiring contexts. They measure performance under artificial pressure, not the ability to ship reliable software.

Better alternatives:

Paid trial project. Give the developer a small, real piece of work (2-5 hours) and pay them for it. Evaluate the output, the communication during the process, and how they handle feedback.
Code review exercise. Show them a piece of code with known issues and ask them to review it. This tests their eye for quality without requiring them to perform on the spot.
Architecture discussion. Describe a system and ask them to sketch how they’d build it. Focus on their reasoning process, not the specific diagram.

How to Structure the Engagement for Success

Once you’ve found the right developer, don’t sabotage it with a bad process.

Define scope in writing before work begins.

“Build me an app” is not scope. A scope document should list specific features, specify what’s included and excluded, and define what “done” looks like. This protects both parties.

Agree on communication cadence.

Weekly updates? Daily standups? Async messages? Set expectations upfront. The number one complaint we hear from clients about past developers is “they went silent for two weeks.”

Own the feedback loop.

Review work in progress regularly. Don’t wait until the end to see what was built. The earlier you catch misalignment, the cheaper it is to correct.

Pay fairly and on time.

Good developers have options. If you’re slow to pay or constantly negotiating rates down, you’ll lose access to the best talent.

When to Call Us

If you’re a business owner or startup founder trying to figure out the right technical path forward, we can help. Whether you need a developer for a specific project, want us to evaluate candidates for your team, or need a fractional CTO to guide technical decisions — book a free consultation and we’ll talk through your situation.

We’ve helped companies ranging from early-stage startups to established e-commerce brands hire well and build the right thing. You can see more about how we work on our services page.