What programmers should I hire based on the software that I want to do?

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There are three kinds of people who think about hiring programmers.

There are working software engineers who have seen the process of greenfielding a project through to actual revenue.

There are already-successful businessmen who are used to hiring people of all specialties.

Then there’s everyone else.

If you’re the former, then you wouldn’t be asking this question.

If you’re the latter, then please save yourself a lot of headache and just use a consulting company.

If you’re a businessman, then you’ve already done the math on hiring a consulting company vs building your own team and think you can save cash and drive a better outcome by managing it yourself. You might be right, you might be wrong.

In order to beat a consulting company’s prices, you can’t hire local developers. They’ve got that market on lockdown. Head on over to one of the legions of freelancer hiring sites and roll the dice. Hopefully by the time your relationship sours you have a measurable delta on the project you’re trying to get built. If you were a working software engineer, then you could have finished the project by then, but you’re not, so keep rolling the dice until you find someone reliable.

Think you’re done? Haha, you’re just getting started. Your one reliable person won’t be loyal. You won’t be paying him enough to make him loyal, and the more you pay him, the more he’ll be able to command in the marketplace, so he still won’t be loyal. You could offer him a real job, but after this project ends you’re not sure if you’ll be able to keep him on. So you’re lucky if you can command any significant fraction of his time. So get back out to the elance pool and look for another one.

Eventually you’ll have version 1 built. Great, ship it, hopefully make more money than you put in. I don’t have to tell you about this because you’ve already done the math. Let’s assume it doesn’t totally flop. You’re going to need version 2 done ASAP. But at least you’ve validated that the market is interested in your product so you can now start taking a more long-term view.

This is when you can start thinking about what kind of programmers to hire.