How to vet and hire engineers as a non-technical founder

As they say, trust is complicated, so I think it's not about avoiding dev shops or finding a tech co-founder. I think it's about being able to verify whether what they (dev shop and tech co-founder) say is what they deliver.

Also, there are already platforms that vet devs/dev shops, and there are devs/dev shops that can provide proof of work. Perhaps it is best to try devs/dev shops with even small deliverables, to let the non-tech indie hacker determine who to work with for the long term.

I guess a technical person here could start a service offering this for non-technical founders that have the budget to pay for it.

Does anyone have tactical advice on how to vet? Any projects you've worked on that have been particularly useful? One issue with vetting technical co-founders is understanding what skills they have and don't have; hard to do if you don't have that background.

Thanks for sharing. This is right on time.

Such a good article to read. There are a lot of situations in business when you ought to hire a professional without being a professional by yourself. If someone has the same experience, please share it with us!

Sometimes assessing your requirements is what is needed. So once you finalize what engineers and skills you need you can make a job post and promote using job forms. https://xobin.com/xoforms/ is one such example of this. After that, for further procedures in selecting the right fit, sign up for https://xobin.com/ and they will reduce all of your pressure in hiring process.

It can be really hard for a non-technical founder to find the right technical co-founder, which wastes precious time.

Another option not listed in the article is to use a Fractional CTO so you can keep more equity but still get the right high-level guidance on team and product building

Great article, and here are my 2 cents:

1. Vetting the engineers or developers, especially the technical side, should not be the responsibility of a non-technical founder.

2. Outsourcing to others to help you interview engineers can work well if you can find someone and trust that person.
   I've helped many of my friends vet their developers, some of them are very technical themselves, but still want to make sure it's the right hire and want me to double-check.

hey, there are multiple ways to hire backend developers. I would suggest you contact an outsourcing company.

i think what is really required is project management and non-technical persons should be able to do that.

Thanks for writing this honest article. One of the issues for many non-tech founders (myself included) is that they don't have the time to do the research/vetting/hiring and so they fall back on the 'easy' options of Dev Shops. I guess the advice then is to make the time at the beginning or you end up paying for it down the road.

Great advice and insights. I wish I knew this a few years back when I hired an engineer to build and manage my website. Let's just say I lost A LOT of money, and I know I was being taken for a ride. When you're in so deep though you just keep throwing money at the problem. Never again. Or maybe again, but I'll follow your advice this time.