Nowadays in 2018, more and more IT companies prefer hiring developers remotely. The employment market has changed and for many reasons, you don’t need to search for a local developer to have a job done. According to Stack Overflow’s 2017 Developer Survey, 53.3% of respondents said that remote options were a top priority when considering a new job. Firstly, the possibility to work from anywhere is valued by the employees and helps people to have more freedom, feel more satisfied with their jobs. Secondly, a business gets a lot of advantages as well, having an opportunity to save the budget and find an exact talent it needs at the moment. Let’s look at some numbers first. Nowadays there is a high demand for Full-Stack engineers, so I have added the recent statistics about salaries in different countries for the full stack developer position :
We can dive deeper into the metrics, but for now I think the overall numbers look representative enough. So what are the other advantages of hiring a remote dev?
As you know, there are a lot of regulations and laws that bind companies with employees and give an additional burden on a business. In some countries, employers pay taxes before paying a salary to the employee as well. Knowing that in 2018 business must be more effective, clever and flexible than ever, the idea of hiring a dedicated remote worker looks very competitive and reasonable. The transparency of costs is a huge advantage too because all additional fees and costs are usually included in an hourly rate.
If we compare listed numbers with developers’ salaries from South America, India, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and other Eastern European countries, for instance, we will see a huge potential for the business to reduce the costs for the development.
There is a great opportunity of hiring a really talented developer and raising your competitiveness on the market. If you have years of experience in IT, you probably have met a lot of developers from these countries who were working on projects in the USA, Canada, the UK, Germany, and Australia, and they were providing astonishing results.
We mentioned the major benefits of hiring a remote developer and admitted the tendency for developers to work remotely, and marked the main regions where you can find the right talents. I won’t be terrifying you with a long introduction anymore. So you decided to hire a remote guy, where should you go? I prepared a list you should definitely check:
Upwork
This is the biggest freelance platform formerly known as Elance/oDesk. The platform contains millions of jobs posted annually as well as millions of freelancers. It is the world’s leading freelancing website.
Here you can find a remote developer for any needs , but the problem is when you post a job you will receive tons of irrelevant requests. The second problem is that even freelancers with good a statistics could be not as experienced as they should be. The platform does not verify or select freelancers profoundly only by basic criteria (their tech support makes a call to check if the candidate is a guy from the avatar), so you need to be a skilled person who knows how to hire, and who has time for the interviews, tests, etc. Anyway, it is one of the best places to start from. Upwork had also some premium programs which selects talented freelancers, but it seems it did not work out, the premium program exists but does not give any advantages.
Freelancer.com
This company is stated to be the largest freelancing and crowdsourcing marketplace by a number of users and projects in the World. The platform has its own benefits like a modern and fast UI, low fees, and a large number of freelancers. Checking the real statistics we will see around 3,5 millions of users a month, compared with 7,5 million on Upwork. (2018 numbers). Perhaps this marketplace tries to attract new users and look huge and successful but it is twice smaller than the market leader, so you won’t find lots of developers there, but I suggest trying this platform anyway.
Peopleperhour
A huge platform that allows hiring a wide range of freelancers including software developers. Founded in 2007. There are really no huge advantages of these platform over Upwork, Freelancer and the others. It’s large and famous so you can try finding a right guy there. I suggest using it after you don’t find anyone who fits your requirements on Upwork or Freelancer.com.
Guru.com
Guru is a freelance marketplace as well as Upwork and Freelancer. It allows companies to find freelance workers for any work. It was founded in 1998 in Pittsburgh as eMoonlighter.com and the headquarters are still there. It is comparable to Upwork but it still has a lack of professional devs while the fees are similar to Upwork’s. You can start searching for the right candidate there, but in my mind, there are no huge benefits of using it. Also, it is 5 times smaller than the Freelancer according to their monthly visits in 2018.
We can add more resources to our list, but it seems it wouldn’t make any sense. You do not need to post your job everywhere, just use 1-2 best platforms and do not waste your time. If we compare the market leader with its competitors we’ll see that the users’ traffic is decreasing dramatically, and the probability of finding a skilled programmer is reducing as well.
But what if we want to find a solution for the business that would help us deliver high-quality results and won’t waste a lot of time? In this case, we need to check premium freelance communities, where you can find verified experts in their field. The price tag will be way higher comparing to Upwork platform, for instance, but you will definitely pay for the actual benefits and not for the marketing stuff.
Let’s start with a leader of the top freelancers’ market – toptal.com.
Using their platform you can hire top freelance software developers, designers, and finance experts in the world. They have great reviews on the internet, a wide range of available developers, a closed network where they will help you to find the right developer! The cons are the price, it’s high and you should be prepared to pay from $60/hour for the developer.
Another interesting resource with talented developers is scalablepath.com. It’s a huge marketplace with more than 6000 developers.
You can choose between a wide range of technologies and find an appropriate developer for your needs. The prices start a bit lower than in TopTal, from $40/hour. They hire a lot of developers from Latin America. I definitely recommend you to check this resource if you will need a freelance developer or even a team.
Another pretty good resource is a www.gun.io.
It is a community of the highest quality talents in the industry. Developer applicants are screened twice – once when joining the community, and once before being assigned to a project.
Some say the rates are really high, starting from 100$/hour. There are the same benefits as in other premium dev shops like US based developers, high-quality services, availability of exclusive community members.
Let’s check a bit smaller companies, but do not worry, they are really cool as well. For example, you can check the X-team.com.
They say that you can hire a motivated developer from their company. I am not sure what that means and why it is the main marketing tagline on their website, but it seems, guys are really tough and have been doing a great job for enterprise clients for the last 8 years. They have great reviews on the internet and a price tag for the USA market which are close to TopTal’s prices.
As you can see there are lots of solutions in premium freelance markets which allows US clients to hire a great developer upon request. But what is with the price?
Prices start from 40$ per hour and go up very high for skilled and tough engineers.
But are there any solutions for startups, small to middle business, not a US based companies, where the quality is important too, as well as a competitive price tag? Where there are no risks which you have on Upwork, Guru, Freelancer etc.?
Yes, there is such a solution.
When you need a middle price tag and a strong, experienced developer, you should look for the developers from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Poland, Turkey, Croatia, Vietnam, India etc. I won’t say anything new, telling that the USA, Canada, Europe, The UK, Australia have received a huge traffic of qualified engineers from these countries. And there are qualified developers who do not want to leave their countries and willing to work remotely.
So what is the solution here? You may search for these developers on well-known resources, and still, you’ll face problems mentioned above.
The other way is to find the right company and hire a developer form there. You can search for such companies on Clutch.co (or over the internet), where you can filter companies using location, stack, reviews score and etc.
The site is really helpful because the reviews that a company receives can only be made by a real client, as every review will be verified by a specialist from Clutch, so reviews look very representative.
I work at soshace.com where we developed a unique approach of hiring and searching for talented developers from the countries listed above. We’ve been testing and improving our approach for the last 3 years and right now it allows us to offer strong JavaScript, Python and Java developers with a middle price tag. We have worked really hard to save customers time on searching and testing candidates and offered a complete and competitive business solution.
Anyway, if you search for the additional advantages for your company you’ll definitely need to check Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian based companies. On this markets, competitive price tag and the quality of engineers are blended in perfect proportions. Such a cooperation will give you additional flexibility, scalability, will save time and budget.
We are looking forward to meeting you on our website soshace.com
