Teaming up with dedicated developers allows you to scale your project easier, cut costs, and mitigate risks. What’s more, dedicated developers ensure knowledge preservation on your project.
What are other benefits of hiring dedicated developers? Where to find and how to hire the best dedicated developers? Let’s find out.
Why hire dedicated developers?
Hiring skilled developers in-house is a complicated process that requires time, effort, and overhead costs. As a result, many businesses choose to hire dedicated developers. And here is why:
- Hiring dedicated developers allows you to predict and optimize costs, as the dedicated development team model is usually 20% less expensive than other cooperation models;
- You can choose different levels of control over the project management (extended team, managed team, and outsourced team). The extended team model gives you the most control over your project;
- Your vendor overtakes all HR-, administrative-, and infrastructure-related responsibilities as well as the risks accompanied by the team scaling;
- Dedicated developers are entirely focused on and committed to your project. Your team of dedicated developers keeps, shares, and grows product knowledge. And even if some team composition changes occur, your engineers ensure a successful knowledge transfer.
Although the benefits of such a partnership are tempting, you have to consider a few important aspects to find, hire and establish successful cooperation with dedicated developers. Let’s start with the essential rules you should follow when you hire dedicated developers.
How to find the best dedicated developers?
Look for offshore or nearshore destinations
According to LinkedIn, as of February 2021, the US job market had over 78,000 unfilled vacancies for software developers. In the EU, this figure amounted to almost 50,000 open jobs.
As a result, the market is experiencing fierce competition for talent. It takes on average 6-12 weeks to find a professional developer. What’s more, the UK, the USA, and the EU rates are much higher than in outsourcing countries, such as Ukraine or Poland, for example.
So, to save both time and money, many companies including Skype, Mercedez, Bosch, Lebara, Fluke Corporation have already opted for outsourcing their software development to nearshore and offshore destinations, and most of them chose Eastern Europe.
Where to look for dedicated developers?
Eastern Europe is one of the most attractive outsourcing destinations. The key reasons are a vast talent pool of 1M developers, reasonable pricing, and high quality of IT services.
Over 60% of the tech talent resides in Ukraine, Poland, and Romania. So, we will scrutinize these countries, considering such aspects as tech education, skills of the local professionals, rates, and others.
Where to hire dedicated developers: Ukraine
Over 30% of Ukrainian outsourcing companies are mid-sized and large vendors. What’s more, Ukraine houses 18 tech companies, recognized by the IAOP. By comparison, Poland is home to one IAOP-listed company.
The IT export in Ukraine amounts to $4.5B, one of the most significant numbers in the region. What’s more, software development outsourcing has over 20% share of all Ukrainian service exports.
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IT hubs
Due to COVID-19, most IT vendors work remotely. As a result, developers no longer have to stick to one city. Nevertheless, five major IT hubs remain unchanged. DOU states that 80% of Ukrainian developers live in Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, and Odesa.
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Talent pool
Ukraine houses the second-largest IT talent pool in the region. The country is home to over 192,000 software developers.
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Education
The country boasts a robust STEM-based education. Nine Ukrainian universities that offer computer science programs are listed in the Times higher education world universities ranking. This ranking recognizes top higher education institutions worldwide.
DOU (Ukrainian IT-related source) states that over 75% of Ukrainian developers have university degrees. What’s more, almost 25% of senior project managers in Ukraine have two degrees.
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Skills
The most used programming languages in the country are JavaScript, C#, .NET, Java, PHP, and Python.
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Language proficiency
According to the DOU survey, 81% of Ukrainian developers have intermediate and higher English proficiency levels. The higher is the position - the more advanced level is.
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Rates
Rates of the developers depend heavily on the cost of living in a certain country. As a result, the cost of outsourcing to Ukraine is lower than to other Eastern European countries, such as Poland, Slovakia, Romania, etc.
Where to hire dedicated developers: Poland
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IT hubs
Warsaw, Krakow, Lodz, Katowice, Wroclaw, Tri-City, and Poznan are known as major IT hubs in Poland. However, the first two cities are home to the lion’s share of Polish software developers for hire.
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Talent pool
Poland is home to the most significant talent pool in Eastern Europe - 295,000 professional developers. However, 40% of Polish tech experts work in the BPO sector, thus are not available for outsourcing.
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Education
Polish developers boast a strong educational background: 60% of them have a university degree, as stated by Bulldogjob. This is a Polish IT-related source that conducts surveys, post tech vacancies, etc.
What’s more, 19 computer science universities in Poland are recognized by the Times Higher Education world universities ranking.
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Skills
According to Bulldogjob, 68% of software engineers here use JavaScript in their projects. Other popular programming languages are Java, C++, SQL, and C#.
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Language proficiency
Poland is a country with a high English proficiency level. This is the language spoken by all tech experts, as Bulldogjob states.
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Rates
Rates in Poland differ, depending on the city, position, and seniority level. The cost of living in Warsaw is the highest in Poland, thus the rates there are also the highest ones. The Polish city with the lowest cost of living and the lowest rates is Rzeszow.
Where to hire dedicated developers: Romania
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IT hubs
If you are searching for software developers for hire in Romania, cities like Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, Timișoara, and Iasi are the best locations for that.
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Talent pool
Romania is the third biggest country in Eastern Europe in terms of the tech talent pool. Over 119,000 software developers live here.
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Education
Times Higher Education world university ranking recognizes 13 top Romanian universities. The best higher education institutions in the country are Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, the University of Bucharest, and the Polytechnic University of Bucharest.
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Skills
JavaScript, SQL, and PHP are the most widely used programming languages in Romania.
Check out this article to learn more about Romanian developers.
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Language proficiency
The EF English Proficiency Index lists Romania among the countries with a high English proficiency level.
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Rates
The city, position, and years of experience influence the rates of software developers for hire in Romania. However, on average, tech professionals here make around $25-49 per hour.
But how to choose the right vendor that will provide top talent for your project? Let’s find out.
How to choose a trusted vendor to hire dedicated developers?
Here are the key steps that will help you to choose a trustworthy IT outsourcing partner:
- Compile a long list of software development providers you will consider and assess their service quality, experience, expertise, security standards, etc.;
- Browse the client reviews, references, success stories, video testimonials of the longlisted vendors. You can find this information on the companies’ websites, LinkedIn accounts, as well as ranking platforms (Clutch, Manifest, Goodfirms). Also, check if there are client reviews of the vendor from the customers of your industry. This will help to understand what your cooperation can be like;
- Consider the vendors’ size and recruitment capabilities: mid-size and large providers are more likely to have resources for your projects requires internally;
- Choose a partner with a powerful employer brand. Such vendor will be able to find top dedicated developers much faster;
- Make sure your vendor is compliant with security standards, such as ISO, PCI, HIPAA, and has an efficient security policy.
Also, make sure your potential partner has streamlined knowledge transfer processes. Check out this article to know more about knowledge transfer.
Pay close attention to the legal aspects of cooperation with your dedicated developers and ways. Learn how to sign a win-win contract here.
Now, let’s take a look at some examples of businesses that have chosen to hire dedicated developers and benefited from the partnership.
Companies that benefited from cooperation with dedicated developers
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Lebara
Lebara is a European telecom company that boasts 5M customers worldwide. Back in 2014, the company needed a vendor to help with their digital transformation program. After a thorny selection process, Lebara has chosen N-iX as their partner.
Seven years later, the cooperation is still ongoing. Since then, Lebara has grown their dedicated development team at N-iX from 10 to 100 dedicated developers.
Our dedicated developers have helped the client with big data and cloud solutions, migration to microservices, omnichannel e-commerce, and more.
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A global technology company (under NDA)
This company is a global Global Fortune 100 technology company based in Germany.
As a leading technology and services supplier, the company has many factories, warehouses, and suppliers, as well as raw materials and finished goods, which circulate among them. They needed to improve the logistics between 400+ warehouses and thus introduced an internal logistics platform.
The platform, however, turned out to have a lot of flaws and was unsuitable for further scaling. N-iX dedicated developers have helped the company migrate the monolithic architecture of the platform to microservices, adopt best DevOps practices, develop a computer vision solution and a multi-platform CV mobile app for it, and more.
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RateSetter
RateSetter is a UK- and Australia-based peer-to-peer lending company that has over 250,000 active customers. Back in 2016, they partnered with N-iX to modernize their product.
Initially, they hired a small team working for RateSetter, and the project has extended to 36 dedicated developers.
N-iX experts have enhanced the quality of the product, as well as the scalability of the solution, ensured the security of the customers’ personal data, and decreased time to market.
Why hire dedicated developers at N-iX?
- N-iX boasts an internal talent pool of 1,200+ developers and a team of 30 professional recruiters who will help you find the best experts for your project;
- We cooperate with businesses from the USA, the UK, and Nordic countries to expand their engineering capabilities;
- Our dedicated developers have versatile expertise and can help businesses in different industries with services, including big data, cloud, DevOps, IoT, and many others;
- N-iX has a robust portfolio of successful big data, data science, and data analytics projects;
- N-iX complies with key security regulations, such as ISO 27001:2013, PCI DSS, ISO 9001:2015, GDPR, as well as HIPAA law, to ensure maximum security of your data;
- We have 18 years of experience and build strategic partnerships with our global clients, such as Lebara, Currencycloud, RateSetter, etc.
