Fact Sheet to Learn Before Hiring a JavaScript Developer in 2023

When it comes to programming languages, JavaScript is by far the most well-known one. In fact, more than 90% of all web pages use this technology. Accordingly, JavaScript developers currently enjoy incredibly high demand. For this reason, if your company needs to hire a JavaScript programmer, you should know it isn’t an easy task.

According to recent studies, the average salaries for top engineering roles in the US grew noticeably in 2021. Likewise, hiring an engineer isn’t easy or cheap. However, we have created a detailed guide to help you overcome this high demand and hire the best JavaScript developer for your company.

This article will start by exploring how JavaScript’s popularity affects your hiring process. Then, we will analyze the average salaries of JavaScript developers worldwide and all the different options you have when it comes to hiring models. Let’s dive deeper into everything you need to know before you hire a software engineer nowadays.

How Does JavaScript Popularity Affect a Hiring Process?

Since almost every website out there uses JavaScript, it becomes evident that this programming language is simply the most popular. To be more precise, each huge platform we know, like Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, or YouTube, is built using JavaScript.

In 2023, JavaScript is the best-known programming language in the world, and JavaScript frameworks such as Angular.js, Experss.js, and Vue.js are in the top 10 best-known frameworks across the world. Together with them, React.js made it to this list as one of the top-known JavaScript libraries.

Moreover, in 2023, JavaScript remains among the top 5 programming languages by volume of active tests.. So, how does JavaScript’s popularity affect your hiring process? Well, since the language is the most popular one, the demand for JavaScript developers is enormous.

The monthly cost of attracting a senior JavaScript developer with good technical experience, a proactive work approach, and fluent English can make from $7.5K to $10.5K, depending on the hiring model.

Source: GlassDoor, YouTeam, Upwork

By itself, knowledge of JavaScript gives only +2.2% to the developer’s salary if we compare it with an average salary worldwide. But as soon as the developer knows specific JS libraries and frameworks, the situation can change significantly. Only Backbone.js can provide a 48.7% salary increase for a developer job.

The value of JS frameworks and libraries is so high because they give almost indefinite possibilities to the language that was created for front-end development. For instance, Express.js and Node.js make it possible to develop different server-side tools using JavaScript. In this way, JS also becomes a language for back-end developers. So the complete application development process can be made on a JavaScript basis. That is why mastering JS basically becomes the first step to becoming a full-stack developer.

Later in this article, we will examine how different hiring models and employment types can help businesses to solve the problem of extreme demand for JavaScript experts in the most cost-effective way.

Still, before we analyze those alternative hiring models, we will have a look and compare the average income of JavaScript developers worldwide.

What Is the Average Salary of a JavaScript Developer Worldwide?

How can information about average salaries worldwide benefit your JavaScript engineer hiring process?

This question can be divided into two parts: why it’s good to know an average salary, and why you should know salary rates worldwide.

The first one is easy, although it can be unobvious for those who are seeking exceptional developers. An average salary is a benchmark. It’s the amount of money that gets an average JavaScript developer. Think of it as a starting point to calculate your development costs.

So if you decide to hire this average developer in-house, your development costs will include their salary, taxes, office costs, vacations, and other benefits.

If you want to have a top JavaScript developer on your team, you need to increase an average developer’s salary accordingly. The more profound an expert you want to hire, the more money you need to pay. And so on.

If we answered the second question twenty years ago, the answer would be that knowing the average salaries worldwide can’t benefit you.

However, due to the technology development and growth of remote work popularity, companies aren’t limited to local talents anymore and can hire a developer from across the world easily and effectively. As mentioned above, various hiring models have altered the marketplace.

Today geography is one of the most important parameters that affect an average salary of a JS developer. To be more precise, the average salary of software engineers is highly influenced by the country the engineer is located in. Let’s analyze those wage differences.

Developers in North and Latin America

Like the rest of the developers, JavaScript engineers in the US have some of the highest average incomes worldwide. More precisely, a JavaScript engineer in the US has an average base pay of around $100K per year. On the flip side, Latin American countries have a lower living cost. 

For this reason, the base salary for JavaScript engineers in countries like Mexico is lower too. For 2023, JS developers located in Mexico earn around $57K yearly. Therefore, Latin American countries provide much more affordable engineers than the US. Let’s also have a look at the situation in Europe.

Source: Glassdoor, Indeed, PayScale

Read more about developers in Latin America.

European Developers

Obviously, the same situation applies to Western and Eastern European countries. To be more precise, countries with high living costs, like Germany or the UK, have more significant base wages than countries like Ukraine and Bulgaria. 

As of 2023, a JavaScript developer located in Germany makes around $72K yearly. Accordingly, software engineers in the UK have an average salary of $78K per year. On the other side, Ukrainian and Bulgarian JavaScript engineers earn around $35K and $30K, correspondingly.

Source: Glassdoor, Indeed, PayScale

Read more about developers in Eastern Europe.

Developers From Africa and Asia

As with Eastern European countries like Ukraine, most JavaScript devs in Africa and Asia have relatively low salaries. To be more precise, average JavaScript developers in India don’t earn more than $9K, and software engineers in South Africa earn around $30K per year.

Source: Glassdoor, Indeed, PayScale

It becomes evident that engineers located in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and South America have lower salaries compared to their colleagues from countries with higher living costs. Sometimes hiring from these regions can be the only way for startups to enforce their team with top-notch developers. 

But hiring from these regions can be different. A company might open a remote development center in an offshore country which will be very similar to hiring in-house, delegate the development process to the outsourcing team, temporarily reinforce their team with an expert via staff augmentation model, or hire a local freelance JavaScript developer.

To understand which option is better in every particular case, we have gathered the different options you have when it comes to hiring a JavaScript developer. Thus, by the end of the next chapter, you will know all the alternative hiring models your company can utilize during your upcoming development team augmentation.

What Options for Hiring a JavaScript Developer Are Available?

We already mentioned how geography could influence your decision if you need to hire a JavaScript developer. Let’s go through the main options you have here. 

Hiring a JavaScript Developer Based on Geography

When it comes to geography, you have three different hiring solutions: you can hire a local engineer, a nearshore developer, or trust your development project to an offshore one. Let’s explore the differences between them.

Hiring a Local JavaScript Developer

This is the traditional hiring familiar to most companies. The talent pool here is limited to candidates that live in the same location where the hiring company operates. 

This approach has multiple pros, such as the ability to meet in person any time, or even work together in the same office, speaking the same language and having the same or very similar cultural background, having the same residency i.e. working under the same laws, having familiar tax system, and so on. All this should help to make work and communication very smooth. 

But the main con in this type of hiring is that you’re limited to a small number of candidates. Even if you live in a metropolitan city, when you want to hire an expert for a position with high requirements to the expertise, you will be in a tough competition for employees.

In terms of organization of candidates sourcing, there are a vast number of places to find a local engineer. From online job boards like Angel List and Glassdoor to hiring through the services of recruiters. You might also check local tech conferences and hackathons. This curated list of regional and local JS meetups and conferences can be handy in this regard.

Hiring a Nearshore Or Offshore JavaScript Developer

On the flip side, you can choose to hire nearshore or offshore developers for your JavaScript projects. Remote web development became a brilliant alternative to traditional hiring at first because of its cost-saving part, and now mostly because of the access to a unique talent.

The difference between nearshore or offshore hiring is first of all in distance from the hiring company (client) to the development center (engineer/s). In the first case, it’s focused on nearest neighboring countries, and in the last one—on countries from far away. For example, for US companies developers from Mexico would be nearshore partners, and from Poland—offshore.

The pros and cons here are similar with some differences driven by geographical aspects. Pros of both nearshore and offshore software development are in the ability to choose from a wider talent pool the exact specialist that you need. Most of the time their salaries would be lower than their colleagues from Northern America, Western Europe, or Australia have simply because of the lower living costs as we already mentioned before. And that is how nearshore and offshore hiring become a cost-effective solution for businesses.

Among cons, the most important is working with a contractor that operates in another legal field which requires more studies at the beginning. Remote work and time to overlap between working hours also can be a pitfall for some companies. In the post-COVID-19 world, it’s getting less important but still exists. Therefore many companies prefer to work with nearshore developers with whom it’s easier to be in touch during the same working hours or organize business trips to meet in person.

Cultural differences and language barriers in cosmopolitical times might be or might be not a problem. Many developers from India or Egypt can be fluent in English and easy to work with. In any case, this is something companies should pay attention to during the hiring process.

When you’re looking for a dev partner in a foreign country, you should always ask for third-party recommendations. There are numerous B2B platforms online like Clutch and G2 that can help you to find trusted companies with the expertise that you require. 

Thus, many huge companies and startups choose this solution since hiring nearshore or offshore developers is now easier, cheaper, and more effective than local hiring.

Hiring a Javascript Developer Based on Employment Type

Now that we have analyzed your options based on geography let’s look at the different hiring models for the employment type. If you want to hire a JavaScript developer, most probably  you will start with one of the following four employment types: 

1. In-house software development
2. Freelancing 
3. Staff Augmentation
4. Outsourcing

Let’s explore each employment type’s pros and cons separately. Ultimately, by the end of this chapter, you will know which solution is the best for your company’s app development needs.

1. Hiring an In-House JavaScript Developer

Hiring an in-house developer is the most traditional way of finding and adding talent to your team. Most often companies hire in-house local candidates. Therefore, all the tips that we mentioned above in a part about hiring local developers can be used here. 

If you believe in the power of networking, we recommend you check these top JS events: JSCAMP, JSConf, JSNation, and JSHeroes.

Even though this is an excellent solution for those looking for full-time workers, it is also the most expensive solution. More precisely, if you choose to hire an in-house JavaScript engineer, you have to pay all financial and non-financial benefits. For this reason, this is a safe yet ultimately expensive employment type.

In this type of working relationship commitment between the developer and employer is the strongest.

2. Hiring a JavaScript Freelancer

If you are looking for temporary help with short-term tasks, freelancers are one of the best ways to go. By hiring a freelancer, all you have to do is wait for them to finish the task and pay afterward. 

There are numerous trustworthy online platforms like Upwork, Toptal, and Freelancer to help you find a great freelancer for your development needs. 

Although freelancers are usually the most affordable employment type, they are not the safest option either. For example, you could face some delays and even project cancellations. This type of working relationship has the lowest level of commitment between a client and a developer. Therefore, freelancing is an excellent employment type for short-term projects but not ideal for big JavaScript projects. 

So, what should you do if you need temporary cooperation to support your core team working on a big project? Well, in that case, staff augmentation is simply the best solution.

3. Hiring JavaScript Engineers via Staff Augmentation

Staff augmentation became a concept in software outsourcing which means that an engineer employed with a dev shop temporarily becomes a team member of a client’s development team. In this way, a client company can involve a real expert on terms slightly softer compared to in-house hiring. Just like freelancing, staff augmentation is a temporary employment model. Nevertheless, staff augmentation is a safer choice than freelancing. To be more precise, this hiring model is safer than freelancing and much more affordable than in-house hiring.

In this type of working relationship, a developer is 100% dedicated to the project, but commitment from an employer is lower than with in-house staff and the contract can be terminated anytime.

Just as always you should check the third-party reviews about the companies you’re going to work with before signing a contract. One more option we can proudly suggest for staff augmentation is hiring via the YouTeam platform. In YouTeam’s talent pool you will find only engineers from trusted dev shops that were vetted by us. This can shorten your hiring time a few times. 

JavaScript developer hourly rates. Source: YouTeam

Browse 200+ JavaScript Developers Available for Hire

However, what should you do if you want a full-time JavaScript engineer or even the whole dev team, but you don’t have time for the management of these new employees? In that case, outsourcing is the best solution.

4. Hiring JavaScript Development Teams via Outsourcing Services

Outsourcing is a very similar employment type to staff augmentation. In both scenarios, your contractor is a development company. But when you choose the classic outsourcing model, you hire a whole dedicated team of specialists that will work on your problem. It’s a good solution for long-term, complex projects, or when you don’t want to be involved in each and every small part of the working process. 

If your company is located in the US or another expensive country, you can outsource your development team to more affordable regions. 

Online B2B platforms include many outsourced software developers and dev teams for you to choose from. With outsourced developers, all your company has to do is host an interview with a full-stack developer suggested by an outsourcing partner and find the best candidate for your needs. 

Still, are developers of countries like Ukraine or India trustworthy? Do they have the same experience and skillset as engineers from the US? Let’s answer these reasonable questions with some recent facts and studies. 

JavaScript Engineers Expertise: The US vs Europe vs Asia 

To answer those questions, we will utilize recent research by HackerRank. According to this research, developers from countries like Ukraine are not only experienced enough but, in many cases, achieve a better IT score than developers from the US. 

To be more precise, Ukrainian developers had a fantastic score of 88.7% across HackerRank’s tasks, which gave Ukraine 11th place on the scoreboard. On the other side, US developers ranked in 28th place and Indian engineers at 31st place. 

Thus, according to this research, many countries like Ukraine, Bulgaria, or Mexico provide top-tier developers. We have also created a table to compare developers from the US, Ukraine, and India regarding other crucial parameters such as time convenience and English proficiency.

One more interesting fact that differs developers from typically outsourcing countries such as Ukraine and client-side countries like the US is specialization. The US developers usually have a wider experience. They are familiar with many programming languages and frameworks, but they don’t have deep experience in any of them. This is very handy when you hire an engineer in-house and you want to be sure that any task can be done by them. 

On the contrary, developers from Ukraine usually have one or two core technologies they become experts in. You can find developers with 5-8 years of experience in JavaScript. But they might be not so familiar with some particular libraries. Such expertise in one field is basically everything companies might wish for when they need to temporarily involve a professional for the solution of some particular problem. In this case, such an expert can deal with a problem faster.

But don’t forget, that learning one library for a professional developer with 5+ years of experience in a similar niche is a piece of cake. So not always the absence of, let’s say, Meteor or Express.js in a CV of a JavaScript developer is a red flag. What’s more important are the problem-solving abilities and the personal qualities of the candidate. And that’s why the interviews are so important.

Interviewing a JavaScript Developer: What Questions Should You Ask? 

Suppose you choose to hire a JavaScript developer through a staff augmentation model, and you want to host interviews with different candidates for the job. What are the best questions to ask if you want to ensure that you hire the best developer for the job? We separated the questions into two main categories: questions about a candidates’ hard skills and questions around their soft skills. 

• Hard skills. You should make sure that the interviewee has the technical skills you seek. Therefore, you can ask questions about their previous experience and JavaScript knowledge (i.e., the language’s features, how to create cross-platform web applications through JavaScript, relevant JS frameworks like Node.js, React.js, or Angular.js, markups like HTML or CSS, functionality questions, etc.). For inspiration, check this list of 100 JS interview questions with answers. All those questions will quickly help you verify a candidate’s hard skills.
• Soft skills. After examining an interviewee’s skills, you can ask questions and make sure they have the cultural fit and background you need. In fact, it is vital to ensure that a web apps developer is a good team player who has the soft skills you need and will fit perfectly into your company. We recommend our remote developer interview tool that helps to be ready for the soft skills interview in five minutes: 150 questions divided into 15 categories to assess the main qualities.

For all temporary types of cooperation, we recommend conducting interviews in this order: hard skills evaluation and then soft skills interview. The reason behind this is that expertise is what is the most important in a short-term perspective. 

But when you hire a team member in-house, we suggest making everything the other way around. First, you need to be sure that a person is a good fit for your team. Only after a successful interpersonal interview, it makes sense to go further with technical evaluation.

Places to Find JavaScript Developers

You can try to find developers directly in places where they are active. We’ve already mentioned a few JS conferences that can be a nice spot to find active engineers. One more direction to think about is online communities and specialized websites for JavaScript developers. We’ve collected a list of such resources for you:

JavaScript Developers at YouTeam

Slack community about All Things JavaScript

JavaScript on Reddit

Learn JavaScript on Reddit

JavaScript Community on Dev.to

JavaScript tread on StackOverflow

Why Is YouTeam the Best Solution to Help You Hire JavaScript Developers for Your Business?

YouTeam is definitely not a place to look for in-house developers. Even though we have regular requests for developer buyouts because clients don’t want to lose great talent. But it’s an exception rather than the rule.

And we can’t help those companies looking for freelancers simply because we don’t have them in our talent pool at all. All our engineers are employed by top dev shops of their countries.

But when it comes to hiring a professional JavaScript developer via staff augmentation or through a flexible outsourced model, YouTeam is simply the best solution. Let’s see all the reasons why:

• Fast matching with clients’ needs: With YouTeam, you can find the best dev individuals or teams in no time. Our platform has selected the most reliable and top-performing development agencies from Latin America and Eastern Europe. Access to engineers of these agencies makes it possible to find exactly what our clients need in less than 48 hours.
• Top-tier developers: Unlike freelancers or individual developers, engineers in our talent pool went through a few-step selection process. Most of them are senior specialists. Thanks to this our candidate-to-hire ratio is 1.75.
• Flexibility: YouTeam authorizes you to interview as many developers as you need. And if you decide to scale your team at any point in your project, we will help you to make this easy and effective.
• There are no hidden costs for our clients: If you choose to hire a JavaScript developer with YouTeam, the sourcing and interviewing process is entirely risk-free. You pay only for the developer’s work, and you know the final rates from the very beginning as they are displayed on each candidate’s profile.
• Numerous good reviews from previous clients: In our platform, you can check all the good reasons why YouTeam is the best choice for you. Most of our clients fully trust our vetting process and choose to stay with YouTeam after trying our white-glove service.

Conclusion

As JavaScript is the most popular programming language, hiring a top-tier developer has become both hard and very expensive. For this reason, we explored all the alternative hiring models you can choose to reduce the cost, without compromising on quality. 

After analyzing the average salaries globally, we concluded that countries like Ukraine provide the best developers at an affordable price. By the end of this article, we analyzed why YouTeam is the best platform to hire a JavaScript developer through staff augmentation.