I have been a developer for over twenty five years. I have also been a founder who has hired developers, a fractional CTO who has helped other founders hire developers, and a consultant who has been called in to fix the mess when the hiring went wrong. I have seen this from every possible angle, and the mistakes non technical founders make when hiring their first developer are remarkably consistent.
This is not about making you feel bad. The mistakes are understandable. If you do not know how to code, evaluating someone who does is genuinely difficult. But there are practical things you can do to dramatically improve your odds of making a good hire. Let me walk you through them.
What you think matters vs what actually matters
Most non technical founders fixate on the wrong things when evaluating developers. They look at years of experience, the prestige of previous employers, the number of programming languages someone lists on their CV and whether they went to a good university. None of these are reliable indicators of whether someone will be good at building your product.
What actually matters is problem solving ability. Can this person take an ambiguous business requirement and figure out how to turn it into working software? That is a fundamentally different skill from knowing the syntax of a programming language. The best developers I have ever worked with are the ones who ask brilliant questions, not the ones who have the most impressive list of technologies on their LinkedIn profile.
Communication is the other thing that matters enormously and gets overlooked. Your first developer is going to be translating between your world and the technical world. If they cannot explain what they are doing in terms you understand, you are going to have a very frustrating time. And if they cannot understand your business requirements and ask the right clarifying questions, they are going to build the wrong thing.
When I interview developers for my own businesses or for clients, I spend less than half the time talking about technical skills. The rest is about how they think, how they communicate, how they handle ambiguity and whether they take ownership of problems or just wait to be told what to do.
Where to actually find good developers
Job boards are the obvious answer and they work, but they are also noisy. You will get hundreds of applications, most of which are irrelevant, and sorting through them is a job in itself. LinkedIn job posts are similar. Volume is not the problem. Quality is.
The best developers I have ever hired came through personal networks and referrals. If you know anyone in tech, ask them. Good developers know other good developers, and a personal recommendation is worth more than any amount of CV screening. If you do not have a tech network, this is where a fractional CTO or a technical advisor can be invaluable. They will know people, or at least know where to look.
For the UK market specifically, there are some decent specialist platforms. LinkedIn remains the best place to headhunt specific people if you know what you are looking for. Stack Overflow Jobs used to be excellent. Various Slack communities and Discord servers for specific technologies have job channels where you can reach developers who are actively engaged in their craft.
Avoid the cheapest freelancer platforms for anything important. I know the rates look attractive compared to UK salaries, but the hidden costs are enormous. Communication overhead, time zone challenges, quality control issues and the risk of the developer disappearing mid project. For your first critical hire, you want someone you can meet, talk to and build a relationship with.
How to evaluate developers without technical knowledge
This is the bit that terrifies non technical founders, and understandably so. How do you assess someone's technical ability when you do not understand the technology yourself?
First, ask them to explain something technical to you in simple terms. Pick something relevant to your project. If they cannot explain it clearly, that is a red flag. Either they do not understand it well enough themselves, or they lack the communication skills you need. Both are problems.
Second, ask them about a project that went wrong and what they learned from it. Good developers have war stories. They have built things that broke, made architectural decisions they regretted and learned from the experience. If someone tells you everything they have ever built worked perfectly first time, they are either lying or have not built anything meaningful.
Third, ask them to walk you through how they would approach your project. Not the technical details. The process. How would they start? What questions would they need answered? How would they break it down? What would they build first? A good developer will have a thoughtful, structured answer to this. A mediocre one will jump straight to talking about technologies and frameworks.
Fourth, get a technical person to do a proper assessment. This is not optional. Even a one hour technical interview with someone who knows what they are doing will tell you more than ten hours of non technical conversation. If you do not have someone in your network who can do this, hire a technical consultant for a couple of hours. It will be the best money you spend in the entire hiring process.
Red flags to watch for
After years of hiring and advising on hiring, I have a pretty reliable list of red flags. These are not absolute disqualifiers, but if you see more than one or two of these, proceed with extreme caution.
They promise they can build your entire product in two weeks. Software always takes longer than you think, and developers who promise unrealistic timelines are either dishonest or inexperienced. Both are problematic.
They insist on using a very specific technology stack without understanding your business requirements first. Good developers choose tools based on the problem. Bad developers choose tools based on what they already know or what is trendy.
They cannot show you anything they have previously built. Everyone has to start somewhere, but if someone claims five years of experience and cannot point you to a single thing they have worked on, something does not add up.
They are dismissive of your ideas or your questions. You are the domain expert. You know your business better than any developer ever will. If someone talks down to you because you are not technical, they are not the right person. You need a collaborator, not a lecturer.
They want to start building immediately without asking detailed questions about the business. A good developer will want to understand your customers, your market, your revenue model and your priorities before writing a single line of code. If they jump straight to building without understanding the why, you are going to end up with beautifully engineered software that solves the wrong problem.
They are reluctant to share their code or have it reviewed. This one is subtle but important. Developers who write good code are usually happy for it to be seen. Developers who write messy code tend to be more protective of it.
Full time vs contract: what makes sense for you
This depends entirely on your stage, your budget and your timeline. Here is how I think about it.
If you have a clear, defined project with a beginning and an end, a contractor makes sense. Build the MVP, get it launched, see if it works. A good contractor will charge between four hundred and eight hundred pounds per day in the UK depending on their experience and the technology. That sounds expensive until you factor in that you do not pay employer NICs, pension contributions, holiday pay, sick pay or provide equipment. The true cost of a forty thousand pound salary employee is closer to fifty five thousand when you add everything up.
If you are building a product that needs ongoing development and you have the revenue or funding to support a permanent hire, go full time. The advantages are significant. Dedicated focus on your product, deeper understanding of your codebase over time, cultural alignment with your business and no risk of them being pulled onto someone else's project.
For salary expectations in the UK in 2026, a junior developer with one to two years of experience will cost thirty to forty thousand pounds. A mid level developer with three to five years is forty to sixty thousand. A senior developer with five plus years is sixty to ninety thousand. In London, add twenty to thirty percent on top of those numbers. These are market rates and trying to hire significantly below them will either attract poor candidates or result in your good hire leaving for better pay within six months.
There is a third option that a lot of founders overlook: a part time developer. Someone who works two or three days a week on your product and freelances the rest. This can be excellent in the early stages because you get consistent, ongoing development without the full time salary commitment. Many experienced developers are open to this arrangement because it gives them variety and flexibility.
The technical cofounder question
I get asked constantly whether a non technical founder needs a technical cofounder. My answer is: not necessarily, but you do need technical leadership from somewhere.
A technical cofounder is ideal if you can find the right person. They share the risk, they are invested in the outcome and they bring a perspective that complements your business skills. But good technical cofounders are rare and the wrong one is worse than none at all. A bad technical cofounder will burn through your runway building the wrong thing and you will have a very awkward conversation when you need to part ways.
The alternative is to hire a developer and get a fractional CTO or technical advisor to provide oversight. This is actually what I do for several businesses. The founder manages the day to day relationship with the developer, and I provide the technical direction, architecture decisions and quality oversight. It works well because you get senior technical guidance without the cost and commitment of a full time CTO.
Setting the relationship up for success
Once you have hired someone, the work is not done. The first three months of the relationship are critical, and there are things you can do to make them work.
Be clear about what you want built, but flexible about how it gets built. You define the what and the why. The developer defines the how. If you start trying to dictate technical implementation details, you are either going to frustrate a good developer or enable a bad one to hide behind your instructions.
Establish a regular cadence of communication. I recommend daily check ins of ten to fifteen minutes in the early stages. Not to micromanage, but to maintain alignment. Misunderstandings caught on day one cost an hour to fix. Misunderstandings caught on day thirty cost weeks.
Ask to see working software regularly. Not code. Working software. Every week or two, your developer should be able to show you something running that you can click on, test and provide feedback on. If weeks go by without seeing anything tangible, that is a problem.
Finally, trust but verify. Trust your developer's technical judgement, but make sure you have some mechanism for independent technical review, whether that is a fractional CTO, a technical advisor or an occasional code review from an external developer. It keeps everyone honest and catches problems before they become expensive.
Hiring your first developer is one of the most important decisions you will make as a founder. Get it right and it accelerates everything. Get it wrong and it can set you back months and cost you a fortune. Take your time, ask good questions, get technical help with the evaluation and do not let anyone rush you into a decision. Your future self will thank you.
