Want to hire React JS Developers? Here’s what you need to know

Working on a project that requires hiring React JS developers? If that’s the case, there’s probably a whole bunch of questions that you’re asking yourself right now.

Where do you find good React JS developers for hire? What skills are must-have and which ones fall into the “will be a plus” category? What is the experience of other companies working with React JS?

Won’t it be neat if you could have all of these questions answered in one place? In this post, we’ll try to do exactly that. So buckle up and read on.

Where to hire React JS developers

I know this one sounds like a no-brainer, but let’s briefly cover your main options:

1. Searching for local talent

This option is great if you’re located in Eastern Europe, South America, Israel, Egypt, India, or the Philippines. If your business is in North America or Western Europe, not so much.

Hiring local engineers in the US, in particular, might cost you up to 2x the price of comparable talent from Eastern Europe. As a result, here’s what the usual hiring routine looks like for far too many US-based companies:

• You decide to hire a skilled React JS developer with at least 1–2 years of experience.
• You start looking for candidates yourself.
• After a few weeks, you decide you need to hire a recruiter who charge 20%.
• You interview a couple of not-so-good candidates whom you don’t want to hire.
• You manage to find a couple of great specialist. The problem is they are already employed, so they want salaries that’s higher than yours (ouch!).
• You experiment with hiring an intern or a junior, but it turns into a disaster. After a few weeks you realise that you’ll have to rewrite everything yourself.
• You realise that hiring a remote React JS developer is the only viable option.

2. Freelancers

The best thing about freelancers is the number of options you get. Upwork, Freelancer.com, LinkedIn, GitHub, StackOverflow and even Jira offer you to recruit freelance React developers directly on their web properties.

The rates of Freelance React engineers start as low as $3 per hour for beginners whose code you’ll probably have to rewrite the first time you see it. If you want to hire skilled React JS developers though, you’ll be looking at a range of $25–65 per hour.

3. Dev shops

Okay, I’m a little biased here, so let’s look at what others say. According to this thread on Quora, enterprise owners consider dev shops a safer bet as compared to standalone freelancers. This holds true because software outsourcing companies put a greater focus of transparency, and their offer more added value (including recruiting, HR, substitutes, etc).

Dev shops will generally do more to make their customers happy because their business relies on getting positive reviews. In particular, getting recommended by the CEOs and CTOs we’ve worked with is how DedicatedTeams attract a large part of our new clients.

Here’s the typical value add that you can (and should!) expect from a great dev shop:

• Great dev shops are extremely selective about their candidates. Typical vetting process includes checkups for skills, algorithmic thinking, problem solving, communication skills, personal traits, etc.
• Great dev shops pay their developers competitive salaries to minimize attrition rates.
• Great dev shops practise regular design and cross-reviews.
• Great dev shops invest into their developers’ professional growth, education, wellness, and motivation.
• Great dev shops handle taxes and provide legal assistance to their clients and employees.
• Great dev shops have in-house HR and recruiting staff.

Aside from this, some dev shops will add non-billable scrum masters and PMs to streamline production process and ensure effective communication.

What to expect from the specialist you’re hiring? React developer skillset and interview questions

Here’s a great way to summarize the core competencies: JavaScript, JavaScript, and some MVC. While this may sound like a gross oversimplification, there’s a grain of truth in it.

One of the reasons why JavaScript developers love React JS is because it makes you write in almost vanilla JS, not platform-specific syntax. Besides, most of the quirky parts in React stem from the weird things found in JavaScript. So make sure you include core JS questions into the technical interview. Specifically, consider questions on the following topics:

• Class vs prototypal inheritance
• Factory Functions vs Constructor Functions vs Classes
• __proto__ vs .prototype
• this keyword in JS
• JS closures
• JS promises
• Function composition
• Pure functions
• Concatenative inheritance

Obviously, there are React-specific questions that you’d pretty much expect your candidate to be able to answer. When hiring a React developer, it’s a must that they are competent with the following topics:

• The difference in the creation of React components with ES5 and ES2015 (ES6)
• An overview of how Virtual DOM works
• JavaScript toolchain: linting, dependency management, transpilation and compilation, style management, source mapping, minification
• Management the lifecycle of React components
• React.createClass versus extends React.Component
• Mixins in React (and whether it still makes sense to use them)
• Higher order components
• Pure functional components
• Keys and refs in React
• setState() vs forceUpdate()
• Flux and Redux

It goes without saying that profound understanding of HTML and CSS is crucial. Given that Bootstrap React is in active development, the experience with Bootstrap might be a plus. Theoretically speaking, experience with frameworks like Angular, backbone, or Ember might be useful, but this shouldn’t be a critical criterion.

You’d probably want to consider that React went open source in May, 2013, which means it’s perfectly realistic to aim at hiring developers with 2–3 years in React JS specifically.

Big Brands using React JS

Knowing what brands use a particular technology is useful because it tells you a lot about the future of the said technology. And it instills confidence to know that React is backed by Facebook and used by giants like Netflix, Atlassian, Yahoo, Imgur, Airbnb and Khan Academy.

According to Attlassian’s Rich Manalang, there were several reasons to choose React over other technologies when rebuilding HipChat:

• React is a library, not a framework, which reduces feature bloat.
• React is component-based, yet more lightweight than other declarative component-based libraries for front end development.
• Virtual DOM is, arguably, the most efficient way of bringing greater speed to the web UI.
• 2-way data binding is helpful in terms of handling mutations.
• KISS-friendly and easy to learn. React’s component-based structure helps developers avoid over-complication, and it’s relatively easy to pick up for newcomers.
• Test-friendly: the Atlassian team reported being able to write more tests for their React-based client as compared to other projects.

An important point that should be added to Rich Manalang’s arguments is that React benefits from a thriving community. This makes hiring React JS developers a simpler task — basically, you only need to know where to look for the most experienced candidates. And if that’s your challenge, be sure that DedicatedTeams is a great option for hiring talented technical specialists.

P.S. Anything else you’d like to know?:)

If there’s anything else related to React JS that you’d like see posted on our blog, just leave a comment. Or maybe, there are other important skills or interview questions that you’d like to point out? In any case, we always appreciate feedback;)