When Should You Hire A Team Of Front-end And Back-end Developers VS Full-Stack Developers? | Systango

7 min readJun 9, 2020

How do you decide what your dev team should look like? Well, let’s address this and any other question you may have about what are front-end developers or back-end developers , why should you hire a team of developers, or can you fulfill all your needs with just one full-stack developer?

Contents of this blog:

What is a Front-End Developer?
What Skills Should You Check Before You Hire A Front-End Developer?
What is a Back-End Developer?
What Skills Should You Check Before You Hire A Back-End Developer?
Why & Why Not to Hire a Team of Front-end and Back-end Developers?
What is a Full-Stack Developer?
What Skills Should You Check Before You Hire A Full-Stack Developer?
Why & Why Not to Hire a Full-Stack Developer?
When to choose a team of full-stack developers or a team of front-end and back-end developers?

Basically, front-end developers are responsible for front-end web development, or client-side development. Here you produce HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for a website or Web Application so that a user can see and interact with them directly.

A major challenge here is that the tools and techniques change constantly to offer better UI/UX experience to users and so the developer needs to keep adapting these new changes.

What Skills Should You Check Before You Hire A Front-End Developer ?

If you want to build an app or a website with exceptional user experience and user engagement, and you want to drive revenue from it, hire someone with the following skills:

HTML & CSS — building blocks of web development. Find someone who is a master of these two languages.
Javascript — There are over 1.6 billion websites in the world, are based on Javascript (1.52 billion web sites with JavaScript). Basically, every device runs JavaScript, including iPhones, Android phones, Apple Mac OS, Microsoft Windows, Linux, smart TVs, etc.

jQuery — Makes it easy to add ready-made elements to a project and customise them as needed.
JavaScript and other front-end Frameworks — AngularJS, ReactJS, Bootstrap, Ember, Backbone.
Furthermore someone who is equipped with

CSS Preprocessors — to speed up CSS coding.

RESTful services and APIs

Fully responsive

Cross-browser compatibility

Testing and Debugging

Git or the version control system you use

They are responsible for server-side development. You hire them to perform all the behind-the-scenes activities that are triggered when you perform any action on a website or an app.

Their focus is on databases, scripting, and the architecture of the web page. They write code for the interaction between database and the browser.

What Skills Should You Check Before You Hire A Back-End Developer ?

Python — Django, Flask, TurboGears, Web2py Ruby — RoR, Sinatra

Java — Spring, Hibernate, GWT, Struts

PHP — Symfony, CakePHP, Laravel, CodeIgnitor

Databases — MySQL, MongoDB, SQLite
Experience with RESTful services and APIs
Design service architecture
Exposure to server management
Git or the version control system you use

Why to Hire a Team of Front-end and Back-end Developers ?

High-Quality & Complex Work- Since you are hiring specialised developers, who are experts in their fields and technologies, they will produce superior quality work.
Faster Development Cycles- You have multiple people working together to produce the next iteration. This allows for the entire team to work simultaneously and get the end results sooner compared to one person working on it all.
Expertise in Latest Trends and Technologies- The front-end developer will be updated with everything new for better user experiences and similarly, the other specialist developers will know all the latest in his web development language.
Easy to Hire- Hiring a dedicated team of developers is definitely found to be much easier. With thousands of developers in the market, you can choose to go for freelance developers or hire developers of reputed web development companies in London.

Why not to Hire a Team of Front-end and Back-end Developers?

Higher Development Cost- If you have a lower budget, having specific developers for specific needs can cost much higher than hiring a single developer who can help with everything.
Inter-Dependency- Web Developers tend to be dependent on another in order to deliver projects. You need an amazing project manager to ensure that their tasks are independent of each other and scheduled properly.
Coordination- More developers means more coordination. For the successful delivery of a project, you have to hire multiple people or teams like web designers, testing, and DevOps along with developers. As many people in the team, that much coordination is needed.

Generally, these are web developers or engineers who can work with both the front-end and back-ends of a website or application. These developers can work on databases, build user-facing websites, and plan the project with the client.

What Skills Should You Check Before You Hire A Full-Stack Developer?

Programming languages: C#, PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, JS (at least one or two).

Frameworks: Symfony, Laravel (PHP), Django (Python), Ruby On Rails (Ruby), Spring (Java), .NET (C#), Node.js, AngularJS (JS).

Markup languages: HTML, CSS.

CMS: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, PrestaShop.

Database: MySQL, MongoDB, SQLite

Based on the standards of coding and different technologies that work best together, you can hire one who specialise in one or the other full-stack:

LAMP Stack: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP

MEAN Stack: MongoDB, Express, Angular, NodeJS

Ruby on Rails: Ruby, SQLite, PHP

Django Stack: Django, Python, MySQL

Why Hire a Full-Stack Developer?

Ability to learn quickly: They have a wide range of knowledge and can easily pick up new things and grow.

Jack of All Trades: They do everything from front-end development, back-end development, QA testing, DevOps to helping with web design and planning project execution.

Save on Development Costs: Hiring one developer who can do it all instead of 2 or more specialised developers will definitely save costs.

Better Project Timeline Implementation: There is less dependency on many team members so chances of delay are less.

Why Not To Hire a Full-Stack Developer?

Less Updated on All Latest Tech Trends — There’s too much to keep track of so it’s difficult to stay updated in everything.

Poor Task Management — When multiple developers work on a project, the project is broken down into various units of work, but when a single person is responsible for the bigger chunk of work, task management, regulation, and checks become difficult.

Jack of All Trades But Master of None — It so happens that these developers can help with a lot of different things but they will probably not have in-depth knowledge of anything.

When to choose a team of full-stack developer or a team of front-end and back-end developers?

So, now we know the advantages and disadvantages of a team vs a single developer. But how to decide when to hire what? Here are a few criteria that will help you make the choice:

For small-scale projects, hiring a single developer who can do both front-end and back-end is always a good idea. But for a full-fleshed project, you are going to need to hire a team of developers to deliver a successful product.

If it’s a small project with simple moving parts, a single person should suffice, but for highly complex projects, going with a team of specialists in front-end, back-end, QA analysis is the best bet.

Sometimes, it happens that our project requirements change after 1 or 2 sprints, these changes can be easily accommodated by a developer who is full-stack as they can easily switch from one thing to another. But if you have fixed and stable requirements, a team of developers should be good.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to the resources available to us. If you are on a tight leash, a developer who knows it all may be the best choice. Obviously, if you have the money to build and hire a team of developers in order to get the absolute best quality product, go for it!

Hire a team of front-end and back-end developers or full-stack developers at Systango

Before you decide how you want to build your dev team, it’s important to consider what your project needs your dev team to be. If you are looking to build a single page web app or something that’s slightly complex, a single developer can take your product from scratch to finish while handling any errors or issues. But if you want to build something that looks like facebook, functions like uber, and has a performance like Netflix, you better get yourself a team.

Who better to hire than a company that has delivered 1000+ top-notch products in the last 13 years. You can hire our team of extremely talented developers who have worked alongside names like Porsche, Grindr, UberConference to deliver beautiful experiences and can do the same for you!

Originally published at https://www.systango.com on June 9, 2020.