How to tell if your developers are actually any good
You pay developers but cannot judge the quality of their work. A plain guide for non-technical founders on how to tell whether your developers are any good.
If you are not technical, the hardest part of building a product is not getting it built. Someone else can write the code. The hard part is knowing whether their work is good.
Here is what that looks like day to day. You pay people for their work but you cannot evaluate the quality of it. You agree to timelines you have no way to check. When something feels slow, you cannot tell whether the work is genuinely difficult or whether it is being done badly. In each case you are trusting people on work you cannot see for yourself.
You do not fix this by learning to code. Learning enough to judge someone else’s work takes years, and you are already stretched thin. You fix it with two things. First, knowing the signs of a good developer that you can spot without being technical. Second, having one person on your side who can check the technical work you cannot check yourself.
How to spot a good developer without being technical
You can tell a lot about a developer from how they think and how they talk to you. You do not need to read a line of their code. Three things tell you most of what you need to know.
A good developer asks why you want something, not just how to build it. When you describe what you want, notice what they do next. The best developers do not just write it down and ask how you would like it to look. They ask what it is for, who will use it, and why it matters. This can feel slow when you want to move fast. It is the opposite. The developer who questions the request is the one who stops you paying to build the wrong thing.
A good developer shows you working software early. You should see a small, working part of the product within the first week or two, not a finished product months later. Working software shows you the real problems while there is still time to fix them: what turned out to be harder than expected, what did not work, what nobody had thought about. A developer who wants to disappear for weeks and come back with everything finished is keeping you from information you need.
A good developer can explain their decisions in plain words. You do not need to understand how something works to judge whether it was thought through. Ask why they did it one way and not another. A good developer answers in terms you understand: this way was faster to build but costs more to run, that way was safer but slower. If the answer is always technical words you cannot follow, treat that as a warning sign. When someone understands their work, they can usually explain it simply. When they cannot, it often means the thinking was not there.
None of these three needs you to open a code editor. They need you to pay attention to how the person thinks, and to trust yourself when the answers do not add up.
You still need someone overseeing the work
These signs tell you whether you are probably in good hands day to day. What they cannot do is stand in for the judgment that sits above the individual pieces of work: whether the whole thing is being built well, whether it will hold up once you have real users, whether the direction being taken now still makes sense in six months. Good developers can and do check the quality of their own code. But someone still has to oversee the delivery and the team on your behalf, set the technical direction, weigh the decisions that matter, and keep the work aligned with where the business is going. Without a technical background, that is the one job you cannot do yourself.
The good news is that it is almost never a full-time job. A company with a handful of developers does not need a full-time CTO to get this, and hiring one at that stage is usually a waste of money. What you need is someone experienced enough to carry that load a few days a month: close enough to the work to steer the calls that matter, and honest enough to tell you how it is really going.
This is what a fractional CTO or technical advisor does. If you want someone to take that load off you, that is the work I do. Get in touch and we can talk it through.