It’s almost 2021 and your company is probably already looking ahead for ways to improve the bottom line, the development pipeline, or customer relationships. No matter what your plans are, there’s one thing you most likely can’t avoid—searching for new development talent.
Why? You might want to expand what your company offers. Or maybe your website or internal operation software is out of date. It’s also possible you’ve grown beyond what your backend can handle. When you need to scale out and up, you’ll need a solid core of developers on your side to help you move forward.
So when you start your search for those new developers, what should you be looking for? What qualities and what languages are on the minds of companies around the globe? Let’s take a look at some of the possibilities.
But first, let’s ask another question.
Where Do You Find Good Developers?
There are a number of ways to locate solid engineers for your company. You could place an advertisement in your local newspaper, use social networking platforms, have your employees spread the word, or use a staffing company.
Another option you should not overlook is outsourcing the work. You can go with onshore, nearshore, or offshore developers. Each of these three options offers plenty of benefits—such as cost-effectiveness, outstanding talent, and a vast pool from which to hire.
No matter what type of developer (or team of developers) you’re looking for, you’ll find the exact talent you need from an outsource development company.
With that out of the way, let’s take a look at what type of engineers you should be looking for.
Native App Developers
You probably came into this assuming we’d drop immediately into discussing web app developers. Although that’s soon to come, you can’t discount the native app developers. Why? Because there will always be a need for apps that run on specific devices. Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and Linux are all still very much the heart of the user experience, and your business needs to include developers that can target specific platforms and devices.
In fact, without native app engineers to craft those brilliant mobile and desktop apps, you’d find yourself very quickly falling behind the competition. No matter what the trends say, native apps aren’t going away. So when you start your search for new developers in 2021, don’t discount native app developers.
Adaptable Developers
It’s not just about a type of application or language. You need to be on the lookout for engineers who are adaptable. You never know what’s in store for the future. We may reach the midway point of 2021 and everything might change. The entire landscape could shift in such a way that much of the focus could end up being on edge and IoT computing. Do you have developers who are agile enough to quickly shift from native apps to edge/IoT?
Or what happens if your vendors or clients demand a complete reshaping of your development or delivery pipeline? Can your developers make a fast enough hit to prevent downtime or frustration?
You might be tempted to only hire language-specific developers, which is a great idea for certain tasks. But having additional engineers who are adaptable to any type of situation will do more for your company than you can imagine.
Node.JS and React
Node.JS isn’t going anywhere. Why? Because it’s the backend runtime that executes JavaScript outside of the web browser. With Node.JS, developers can create command-line tools and scripts that can, in turn, create dynamic web content prior to a page being sent to the browser. With server-side content generation, page load times are dramatically reduced. And given Node’s ability to scale (both horizontally and vertically), there are almost no limits to what it can handle.
To go along with Node.JS, there’s React, which is a JavaScript library used to create interactive elements on websites. With this, your websites are more exciting and better capable of presenting your company (and its products) in a modern and user-friendly way.
With these two pieces together, developers can not only create incredibly robust websites but ones that are exciting and enticing to users. You don’t want a website that makes your customers think they’ve traveled back to the late 90s or early 2000s (and not in a whimsical way). Those users want sites that are in line with today’s standards, as well as mobile-friendly. Node.JS and React can help deliver that.
NoSQL and Big Data
If your company exists within the enterprise space, you’re going to need big data on your side. That means working with databases that can handle the load and the demands placed on them by analytic and visualization tools.
Without a NoSQL database to store that ever-growing store of data, you’ll hit a wall when that relational database can no longer take on the massive collection of information or isn’t capable of presenting the data in a useful manner.
That means you’ll be shifting away from the relational database and migrating to the likes of MongoDB, RavenDB, Redis, Couchbase, and Cassandra. If you already have DB admins on staff, make sure they are well versed in NoSQL, otherwise, you’re going to need to do some hiring.
Rust
Rust is already found in nearly every top 10 list of programming languages you’ll come across. That popularity isn’t going to be waning anytime soon. Rust focuses on speed, memory safety, and parallelism. With this language, engineers can create games, operating systems, file systems, browser extensions/features, and simulation engines. And because Microsoft is now looking into adopting Rust, you can bet this particular language will skyrocket in 2021.
So, if you don’t already have a few Rust developers on hand, you best be on the lookout.
Containers Will Continue to Grow
If you want your company to be as agile and efficient as possible, you’re going to need developers that can work with containers and container environments. This means Docker and (especially) Kubernetes.
With containers (and clusters) you can deploy applications and services on the fly and create automation systems to not only keep those running smoothly but scaling up and down and even repairing themselves automatically.
But containers take a special kind of developer. You not only have to fully understand YAML and other languages, you have to be well-versed in clustering and container runtimes.
If you want your enterprise company to remain in competition with the others in your sector, you will have to consider containers for your development pipeline.
Conclusion
The tech industry is always changing. In fact, with each passing year, the speed at which tech evolves seems to get faster and faster. So who knows, maybe by mid-2021 this list will already be irrelevant. But until that time comes, this list should keep you and your company moving forward in the right direction.
