Insights · 5 min read
Hiring developers is hard when you cannot read the code. A practical checklist for founders: what to ask, what to test, and how a dedicated team removes most of the guesswork.
By GGP Editorial
I have sat on both sides of the hiring table. When I hire for our own team I can read a pull request and know in five minutes whether the person is good. Most founders do not have that. They are hiring a developer to build something they cannot themselves evaluate, and every candidate sounds confident in the interview.
GlobeSoft has run a team of 40-plus engineers since 2018, and we have also sat on the receiving end of this process hundreds of times, because clients hire us the same way they would hire any developer. Here is what actually separates a good hire from an expensive one.
The classic mistake is quizzing a candidate on a language feature. "What is a closure?" tells you they studied for an interview. It does not tell you they can ship.
Ask about work instead. "Tell me about the last project you finished, and what went wrong with it." A good developer answers with specifics: the table that grew too large, the retry logic that hid a data bug, the weekend spent fixing a payment that double-charged. A weak one gives a generic story about teamwork and deadlines. Listen for specifics. They are the only evidence that survives an interview.
Do not ask for a big unpaid take-home project. That filters for people with spare time, not skill. Pay for two or three hours of work on a small, real task from your actual product. It can be tiny: a form that validates an input, a script that moves data between two formats, a page that loads a list.
Then look at the small things, because that is where the person shows themselves. Do they handle the error case? Did they write a short README so you can run it? Is the code in a shape another person could read? You do not need to understand the code to see whether it is tidy and whether the person thought about what happens when the input is empty. That attention to edge cases is the difference between someone who writes features and someone who writes software you can maintain.
This is where our clients tend to land, and I think it is the right place. Hiring one freelancer at a time means you are the project manager, the architect, and the quality control. Most founders are none of those, and the work stalls while they learn.
A dedicated development team changes the shape of the problem. You get a named lead who runs the day-to-day, a standard stack, and code review built in. You still own the product decisions, but you stop being the person who has to notice that two freelancers are building the same feature two different ways. We run teams this way for clients in Brazil, South Africa, Singapore, and the US, with a fixed overlap window every day and a shared group where questions get answered instead of sitting for a week.
The stack is not exotic, and that is deliberate. Java with Spring Boot on the backend, MySQL and Redis for data, and Vue or React on the front end, with Node, Go, or Python where the job needs them. When you hire a team on a common stack you are not locked to one person's pet framework, and you can find your next developer without a hunt.
Here is a short table that has saved a few of our clients from a bad start:
| Check | What to look for |
|---|---|
| Does their past work run? | A live product or a demo you can click, not just a portfolio PDF |
| Who is your daily contact? | A named lead, not a rotating account manager |
| How do they handle the time zone? | A fixed overlap window, not "we will figure it out" |
| Can they take the whole project? | The range matters: AI, IoT, payments, mini-programs, whatever the product needs |
We tick all four, but you should hold anyone to them. A team that cannot answer the time-zone question on day one will not answer it on day sixty.
You cannot fully evaluate a developer whose code you cannot read. The way to close that gap is not to pretend you can. It is to hire a team that shows you working software on a regular cadence and gives you a daily contact who translates between your business and their code. That is the whole trick.
We built a brokerage trading system covering Hong Kong, US, and A-share markets, a billboard design platform for a Brazilian company, and a self-ordering plus POS system for restaurants. None of those clients needed to read code. They needed working software, on a schedule, with a team that answered the phone.
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