Over the past few years, IT industry has experienced a booming demand for PHP professionals. PHP seems to have won the hearts of IT professionals and market alike with its robust development potential. An increasing number of customers are looking to hire PHP developers for their web application development projects. And is it hard to find a PHP developer for hire? Absolutely not! One search on Google and you end up with a long list of companies offering PHP developers on hire.
This brings up the problem of abundance. You have several options to choose from. Now, given that hiring an offshore PHP developer is often a strategic decision, you need to be real smart here. Weigh your options for pros and cons. A wrong move can land you in a soup where you end up spending more than you ought to. Or worse yet, you can end up hiring a PHP developer who can do no good for your application. So how do you proceed? For starters, the following tips may be helpful.
Know Your Project Requirements
Before you start evaluating a PHP developer you need to know what exactly your project demands. This is where you start analyzing your requirement. Do you need a core PHP developer? Do you need a PHP developer who is proficient in open source frameworks like WordPress or Joomla? Get your project requirement straight first and then start searching. This will help you save time and resources.
Experience Level
Try to find out if a PHP developer is mature enough to handle your development requirements. Here, it’s not only the experience in terms of number of years that matters. A PHP developer should also have proper understanding of your business domain. Who would you rather choose a developer with decade long experience but not in your industry vertical or a developer with 5 years of experience in your own vertical? Your best bet would be to hire a PHP developer who has worked on multiple business domains including yours. This experience would have shaped up his understanding and his business logic.
Technical Proficiency
This is purely technical stuff. This is where you evaluate a PHP developer’s coding skills. You assess his programming and analytical abilities. Do remember to check a PHP developer’s comfort level with HTML, MySQL, XML, JavaScript, AJAX, and so on. It won’t hurt to hire a multifaceted developer. In addition to this, try to see how good a developer is at addressing hacking and security issues. A PHP developer should also focus on coding in such a manner that it improves the application runtime. This will be another crucial factor for your application.
Certifications
It’s always good to know that a PHP developer you intend to hire has technical skills certified by other reputed names. It reinforces your analysis and judgment. So try to see if the company you are hiring PHP developer from has won some accreditations or acknowledgements from other organizations. These acknowledgements can be for technical abilities, quality processes, affiliations, etc.
Communication Fluency
This is especially important if you are considering hiring an offshore PHP developer. Try talking to a PHP developer and gauge his communication skills. A PHP developer has to be comfortable with your preferred language. He should be in a position to comprehend your working instructions and communicate back effectively any of his concerns. But this is only one side of the communication aspect. The other aspect is cultural exchange. When working with an offshore developer there is a cultural chasm that you might encounter. Ensure that this cultural divide is not so huge as to impact your project or rapport with the developer.
Check Developer’s Portfolio
This is where you should be real smart. There are companies out there who will give you enterprise level portfolio. But they would not be comfortable sharing developer specific portfolio. This can be fishy. Always demand for a developer specific portfolio. Question the developer over what technologies he has employed in the application. Ask him what coding standards he has followed. If possible try to read a case study of the project. This will give you a detailed insight into what the application is all about. This is your final frontier in PHP developer evaluation.
There is no foolproof method of hiring PHP developers. But a little caution and evaluation can help you avoid bad taste in your outsourcing endeavor. An ideal PHP developer can transform your vision into reality effortlessly. Just spot the right PHP developer and hire him!
