Hire a Team of Developers or an Individual?

If you are struggling with whether to hire a team of developers or a freelance individual for your business, then you have come to the right place. But before we start making the comparison, let us discuss some benefits of hiring a team of developers and freelance individuals for your better understanding.

Benefits of Hiring Team of Developers

Developers who work full time for you have bought your idea and the opportunity to work with you at a high opportunity cost. They are investing their time and efforts in your business and are interested in the final results. They are unlikely to back out of your organization and, if appropriate, will be long-term players.

The team of developers knows what is happening in the organization and can change directions very easily. A new feature of waiting for an allotted meeting time may take precedence over casual conversation. They have close exposure to your business activities and can provide potential solutions or improvements in the ongoing projects of the business.

When you hire a team of developers, they follow best practices for developing products. so that in return they help improve productivity right from the start of your project. Likewise, when the team has experience in developing similar projects, you are sure about the result of your project.

Some projects require extra skills. When you hire a team of developers, you will not have the burden of hiring full-time employees. Also, when you hire a team of developers, you can gain access to their extensive expertise, knowledge, skills, and ideas to develop your product.

Benefits of Hiring an Individual

The most undervalued advantage of hiring an individual freelancer is the ability to provide their expertise based on a project without a long-term commitment. Now you may need someone with a skillset, but in a few months, you will need someone with a completely different skill set. Therefore it will be better if we hire an individual freelancer instead of a full-time team of developers.

This sounds foolish, but many office fees are a huge obstacle for developers in the environment. With lunch, office gossip, and travel, developers have little time left to do real work during office hours. Also, this usually means that developers should work longer hours than necessary, which hurts the spirit and work ethics of the company.

Hiring an individual freelance developer is very cost-effective. The cost of office, lunch, travel, etc will reduce. If you are a start-up and work doesn’t have several complexities, then hiring an individual developer is always better.

Now that we discussed the benefits of hiring a freelance individual or a team of developers, let’s begin the comparison. Should you choose a team or an individual depends on a lot of factors. We will discuss some of the major factors and help you seek a better solution for your problem.

Cost

Whenever we take any decision regarding our business, the cost is the first thing that comes in our mind. And why not? Cost consideration is important. Therefore, whether you should hire a team or an individual, depends majorly on your budget. A team of developers will charge a higher price for their services as compared to an individual. However, you need to consider other factors also, like quality, reliability, expertise, timely work done, etc.

Quality

Quality is another important factor. It separates the best from the better. To get the best results from your product or services, you should not compromise with the quality. The quality of work supplied by a team of developers will be better than an individual in most cases. There is no thumb rule that teams will perform better than individuals. However, in most cases this discussion holds. A team of individuals has more creativity, manpower, expertise, than an individual.

Reliability

Hiring an individual freelancer does not assure reliance. This is because they do not work on a full-time basis. Therefore in case of urgency, you might not have someone to depend upon for your work requirements. You can assure reliability in case you have hired a team of developers in your company.

Responsiveness

If you wish to hire someone who meets its deadline requirements and responds to your needs on time, then it’s advised you better hire a team of developers than a freelancer. A freelancer is working for multiple people at the same time and they might not be available for you every time. In this case, a team of developers is the right choice over freelancers.

Experience

When it comes to experience, you can never say whether a team is better or an individual. You might hire an individual because of his/her experience over a team of developers and vice versa.

Conclusion

Overall, our general recommendation for people who want to know whether they should outsource the work to an individual freelancer or keep a team of developers is that the correct answer varies from situation to situation and is usually a blend of both. If there is a technology entrepreneur who can easily transmit the technical requirements associated with hiring outsourced workers, this can be a reliable solution.

Expert developers prefer to work on more new challenging projects where their skills may make a difference. If you are looking for individual developers to hire, such highly skilled specialists can avoid your project. The observation is that the work can be at lower levels like lower bug fixes and fewer updates. When you hire a team of developers, you can get access to some of the most expert developers.

Nowadays many talented developers are opting for the freelance lifestyle and its promised flexibility: the ability to work on a variety of projects and the opportunity to travel. These developers tend to work with startups and collaborate on cutting-edge technologies. They are much more cost-effective than hiring a full-time team of developers and often do not want equity.