Choosing Between Front-End, Back-End & Full Stack Developers

How do you decide what your developer team should look like?

Well, let’s address this and any other questions 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?

When you dive deep into categories of developers; the following three names pop up:

• Front-end developers: One who develops the visible elements of the website.
• Back-end developers: One who develops the infrastructure and database behind the scenes.
• Full stack developers: One who can develop both servers as well as client software.

All the above are commonly referred to as web developers as well.

Who is a Front-End Developer?

Front-end developers are responsible for front-end web development, or client-side development. The front-end developers and architects realise development using web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. In a crux, the design elements you see on any website are created by a front-end developer.

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

What Skills Should You Check Before Hiring 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:

1. HTML & CSS – building blocks of web development. Find someone who is a master of these two languages.
2. Javascript – As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Basically, every device runs JavaScript, including iPhones, Android phones, Apple Mac OS, Microsoft Windows, Linux, smart TVs, etc.
3. jQuery – Makes it easy to add ready-made elements to a project and customize them as needed.
4. JavaScript and other front-end Frameworks – AngularJS, ReactJS, Bootstrap, Ember, Backbone.
5. 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

Who is a Back-End Developer?

Back-end developers 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 web page architecture. They write code for the interaction between the database and the browser.

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

1. Programming Language and its Frameworks (any one of them)
   • Python – Django, Flask, TurboGears, Web2py
   • Ruby – RoR, Sinatra
   • Java – Spring, Hibernate, GWT, Struts
   • PHP – Symfony, CakePHP, Laravel, CodeIgnitor
2. Databases – MySQL, MongoDB, SQLite
3. Experience with RESTful services and APIs
4. Design service architecture
5. Exposure to server management
6. Git or the version control system you use

Why Systango

Building a new product is all about risk. And choosing the right team is the most essential step toward success. Talking to us will give you more clarity about what your business needs.

Reach Us

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

• High-Quality & Complex Work- Since you are hiring specialized 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 from reputed web development companies in London.

Challenges In Hiring 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 one 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 are in the group, much coordination is needed.

The above problems can be sorted by hiring developers on an hourly basis. You can connect with any IT company to outsource your development work, get quotes and can consider outsourcing the development work to their skilled developers.

Tip: Systango is one such company, we can help you with end-to-end IT outsourcing. Our skilled workforce includes front-end, back-end, and full-stack developers but is not limited to them. We can help you with staff augmentation, consultation, and next-gen technology implementation.

Who is a Full-Stack Developer?

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 specializes 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, and 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 specialized developers will definitely save costs.

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

Challenges With 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 on 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.

Team of full-stack developers Vs 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:

1. Is the Project Big or Small?

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.

2. How Complex is the Project?

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, and QA analysis is the best bet.

3. Is your Project flexible?

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.

4. How much can you Invest?

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!

Why Systango?

If you do not possess the skill, time, or budget needed for your custom development needs, talking to our team is the perfect place to start.

Reach Us

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 performance like Netflix, you better get yourself a team of skilled application development experts.

Who better to hire than a company that has delivered 2000+ top-notch products in the last 15 years? You can hire our team of extremely talented developers who have worked alongside names like Porsche, Grindr, and UberConference to deliver beautiful experiences and can do the same for you!

Mayank Khare

September 22, 2022

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