How to find and hire a 10x developer
The elusive 10x developer does exist. Here's how to find and hire them 👇
Some upfront notes:
This is not the best strategy if you're hiring in bulk and have headcount goals
This involves realtime screensharing and coding
You believe that one 1 part-time 10x dev is better than 3 full-time mediocre hires
First, skip the hiring sites and agencies. Sure you can use those "1% talent" services, but you end up paying a premium. The best devs usually are working at their own country's FAANG or YC-funded equivalents. Having a middleman agency has pros/cons, but in the end you still need to onboard your devs.
Sign up for Codementor.io and post a one-time job.
This job post should be a gnarly bug or headache-inducing task. It should be something that highly impresses you if it gets fixed/implemented. It should make you feel like a gigantic weight has been lifted off your shoulders. Some examples:
Migrating soon-to-be-deprecated Google APIs
Finding and optimizing slow DB queries
Implementing CI/CD pipelines
Fixing devops issues in Linux environments
These are the 5 big reasons why I like this method:
You hire international talent but aren't competing with large companies.
You kill two birds with one stone. You reduce your tech debt and vet candidates. With normal hiring, there's usually a take-home assignment involved, but that's useless other than vetting code quality. You get to see them work in real-time while they get paid their rate. You see if communication is an issue and you see their best and honest first-impression of how they work.
Someone who can guide you through a screenshare needs to know their shit. You let them control your screen, and you follow along in how they solve the problem. Tech stacks are different, but knowing how to navigate unknown code from one keyword/issue is the skill you're looking for in a senior dev. 99% chance they will need to Google the issue in order to solve it. When they start getting a lead, the best response you can hear is "Hey, give me 1 hour to look into these docs. I will be right back"
Codementor freelancers usually offer to hop on a pre-call first to see if it's something they can take on. This works in your favor.
There's a reason devs are on Codementor: to make extra income. If you can provide a consistent source of income and negotiate a reduced rate for a long-term relationship, it's good for everyone.
Some other things to note:
Make sure you are on top of your controlled access (API keys, secrets, etc)
Not everyone may be open for a long-term working relationship. Even if that happens, you end up with an expert on tap for short-term engagements in case any shit hits the fan in your codebase that you can't solve yourself.
This is a minor cost but worth noting: Codementor is free, but costs $9/mo for access for untethered messaging to all freelancers.
The biggest tradeoff is your time. However, valuing quality, I've found this to be the best method.