Should You Hire a Software Programmer in San Francisco or Outsource?

How to hire software developers in San Francisco

To start off let’s take a look at what the market for software development in San Francisco looks like. The Bay Area is a host of around 14,000-19,000 active tech startups compared to the US metro average of about 4,000. This has created a big draw for developers to head west for ample work opportunities. In essence, if you decide to hire a freelance software developer in SF, you won’t need to spend a lot of time as there are dozens of different resources offering contractors to work with. Some software developers in San Francisco are paid up to $250,000 annually. Alongside this hefty salary, developers can expect some attractive perks and equity packages to make the commitment well worth their while. While this number is stifling, it’s not the norm for the rest of America. In fact, the national average for software developers is a measly $91,000.

From this, we can extrapolate a few things: the market for software development in San Francisco is heavily saturated and growing (The projected percent change in employment for this profession is 17% from 2014 to 2024- that’s 10% greater than all other occupations). What companies hire software developers in San Francisco? Basically, everybody in Silicon Valley is looking to hire the same people and as the market is so saturated, this makes hiring and retaining developers extremely difficult for San Fran tech companies. The competition for talent includes thousands of startups as well as the big guys like Facebook and Google. This competition for talent inevitably increases costs.

Take a look at the salary growth for software developers in California over the last six years. There has always been a premium on Silicon Valley software development and apparently, that trend is also not dying out. Over the last two years, there has been a 10% increase in salary for software engineers in San Francisco.

Now let’s consider benefits of hiring outsource programmers when you are building your startup on early-stages.

The first question you may consider is why you should outsource something in the first place? Speaking of outsourcing software development, it will require delegating your development processes to the third parties. This smart use of external resources will let you reduce the work from within your company and acquire a better control over the resources you spend. Furthermore, outsourcing allows you not only to contract companies and discuss some functions but also to obtain a trusty long-term business partner.

806 Software Developers Available

When it comes to software development outsourcing it appears that there are quite a lot of companies that position themselves as the experts of the client’s specific market. Obviously, it brings nothing new to the client and doesn’t extend his or her knowledge about the outsourcing company. You could decide to outsource to offshore destinations such as countries in Central and Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, and Romania) as it is more cost-effective and you may likely get the same result.

Below are some of the benefits of outsourcing software development via YouTeam:

  1. Active management. You can have an actual conversation with the actual developer actually building your product.
  2. Cost savings. You don’t have to pay for your SF tech company’s deluxe coffee bar while the dev agency on the other side of the globe handles all the bureaucracy and office management
  3. Faster production. Working only on your project means more time for your developers to dedicate to your product.
  4. Top talent. Outsourcing development means you get to choose from a global range of developers rather than just those in between Mountain View and Santa Clara.

Knowing the advantages of outsourcing your software development the next thing you should consider is the steps involved in how to hire software engineers in San Francisco.

There are 5 simple stages, and the objective of our procedure is to spare you time and money while expanding the possibility of getting the best applicant you can discover. You will provide the job description via a short call with our Team Advisor, get a list of developers that fit and are available to start next week, then you can set up interviews with those you found interesting. However, our matching system is unique and most probably we will send you profiles of engineers that are really a good fit. You can give engineers a programming task, or initiate the coding session during the next stage of the interview process. When they complete the task, you’ll have the capacity to audit the code and figure out who has the best implementation and after that, you ordinarily will be able to contract that individual or that team. The steps are listed below.

Simple steps on how to hire software developers in San Francisco:

  1. Post a Job Vacancy on a Job Site
  2. Shortlist and hire the best Candidates (minimum 10 but during the pandemic times you might be getting about 200 applicants, imagine how hard it is to review them all)
  3. Launch the interview process
  4. Prepare a test assignment for the selected candidates
  5. Chose top developers based on the completed assignments
  6. Compete against other companies for some great talent (which might be costly)

What is the alternative? Enlisting a contractor. Seems like a demanding task, yet you can secure a decent outsourced developer in a few easy steps if you work with us.

Perfert team, we verify skills

Written by
YouTeam Editorial Team

We love featuring verified solutions to outsourcing problems and coverage of remote work trends. We want our blog to be a source of inspiration for tech entrepreneurs and product people who are looking to build distributed development teams across continents.

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