The number of IoT solutions implemented by companies around the world has slowed down a bit but continues to grow. In 2021, the number of IoT startups exceeded 1200, and investments returned to pre-COVID-19 level after slightly declining in the second half of 2020.
On this background, the companies’ war for digital talent is gaining momentum. Finding qualified Internet of things developers has become both a massive challenge and a significant obstacle for the smooth advancement of AI, IoT, digital transformation, and cloud projects. According to IoT Analytics, the number of job ads that included “IoT” in the description, grew by +32 percent in the first half of 2022.
Distrelec has also analyzed the companies recruiting for IoT jobs in the period between March and May 2022 and discovered that approximately 52 500 IoT active positions per month were listed during this period globally, with only 19 500 positions per month closed. This demonstrates the great potential that the IoT holds. In 2019 Kaspersky claimed that more than 60% of companies have already implemented IoT applications, but the advantages and quick development of the technology don’t make one doubt it will stay in favor still a long time.
Businesses that are preparing to do well out of their IoT investment should recognize that their ability to satisfy HR needs is one of the main conditions for successful competition.
Whether your company wants to create a new IoT platform or integrate IoT into an existing solution, you require a dedicated IoT team of experts who can develop applications and hardware to bring your business ideas to life. In this article, we are going to share our experience in hiring such employees.
How to hire an Internet of Things (IoT) developer, where to find a team for an IoT project, what are the best practices in IoT recruiting, and what is a typical IoT developer’s salary? All this and whatever else you’ve ever wondered about on the subject of IoT personnel enrollment for your attention in this detailed article. So, let’s step on the gas. 
According to the Microsoft survey, 47% of enterprises say they lack the qualified staff to accomplish their IoT solutions. Moreover, 20% of companies dismiss implementing IoT due to its complexity.
IoT specialists are software engineers who create applications for various IoT devices (and then update the IoT devices), as well as digital platforms on which these devices operate.
If you decided to conquer a mountain named IoT, hiring a team of ordinary programmers and developers will not be enough. Specific knowledge and experience are needed to develop, debug and deploy IoT devices. One of the key differences between hiring an IoT developer or other engineers is that they are to be experts in making friends between firmware, software and hardware.
There are a number of other specific skills. So the chief demand to the IoT development team you involve is having a convincing portfolio of IoT projects specifically in your target industry, not just examples of convenient and reliable applications wherever. This is the only way to guarantee the final product meets your expectations and cope with the tasks it is charged with. Go on reading if you are already keen as mustard to find and hire IoT programmers like these.
You have several options if you are going to get a professional development team for your IoT product:
Since the latter option is most common among companies, we are going to elaborate on it. Why do we also believe that outsourcing is a good choice?
Reason 1. You can hire IoT developers from any jurisdiction and geolocation, overcoming the supply shortage concern of where you are. The range of options you have expands significantly, allowing you to attract a vendor with an impressive portfolio of successful IoT projects deployed within your industry.
Reason 2. You reduce the budget of your project. Outsourcing saves your IoT development costs on talent acquisition and retention, all programmers’ benefits, IT infrastructure, office supplement, all paper, and HR work. All this falls on your vendor’s shoulders, you just choose an hourly rate acceptable to you.
Reason 3. You save time searching for experienced employees with the required profile. According to IT World, the average period between the time you initially post a job to hire an IoT software engineer and the date you really hire him is 35 days. But that only applies to a typical developer who’s hired for a very basic position. If you want to hire an IoT developer with specialized skills, as it is in our case, your employment time could be 8-12 weeks or even more.
These are only the main reasons, but definitely, they are not limited to this list.
So, a dedicated IoT developers/development team or an offshore team is one of the most popular team models today. Companies from developed markets, such as Europe or the USA, rely on offshore IT outsourcing in countries with high quality, availability, and reasonably priced candidates compared to home markets.
To find the best team, you need to compare the benefits and risks of each country in terms of IT development and choose the best balance between price and quality.
We’re going to give a brief description of the pros and cons of popular destinations, and you, having made a choice, can start searching for a company. We advise you to use the services of such trusted portals as Clutch or Top Tech Biz, which provide not only data on the best IT companies, but also objective assessments of the specialists who contacted them.
Do not neglect making your own research on the Internet to inquire about candidate companies from your top list. Pay attention to all the components that can say something about the supplier’s expertise: the content of his website, blog, and LinkedIn page, mentions the company to participate in specialized conferences, summits, and other events, positive references from clients/ competitors/media on the company’s real cases.
You can get some tips from this small overview of popular regions for outsourcing.
Asia
China and India are the most in-demand among those who want to hire IoT developers in Asia. Being home to many fast-growing IT startups, China has advanced technologies and experienced professionals. India has relied on IT as one of the budget-forming industries, giving it appropriate support. In both countries, much attention is paid to tech education based on the best Western approaches. Among the positive qualities of developers from China, one should mention their extremely high diligence and persistence, which allows them never to give up facing a challenging task.
On the other hand, the cost of Chinese developers has recently been approaching European hourly rates. India is still one of the cheapest labor countries in the world. However, despite significant efforts to improve the skills of local personnel, their tech level leaves much to be desired. That is why most customers still prefer to give Indian engineers orders, the implementation of which does not require specific skills and super-high qualifications.
Along with this, intellectual property issues remain relevant in both countries, so lawyers recommend carefully calculating risks associated with IP rights and private information.
As an alternative in Asia, you can consider the Philippines or Malaysia. More than 90% of Filipinos speak English, and together with a population of over 100 million, it makes them one of the largest English-speaking countries in the world. Their government is actively investing in IT education, however, they have not yet managed to overcome a significant quality gap with the rest of the world.
Malaysia’s software engineers are also behind the Ukrainian, Polish, and even Chinese IoT application developers in tech expertise, but even they are snapped up very quickly: competitive prices, business-friendly policies and well-developed digital infrastructure put them at an advantage.
South America
Argentina is the main outsourcing destination in South America. IT companies here are experienced in software development, mobile development, DevOps, and cloud computing. Compulsory schooling includes a basic computer awareness, digital competency and even basic programming. Argentina has not the lowest rate in comparison with other countries in the region, but the highest ratings in terms of investment in IT education and the development of the IT sector.
However, keep in mind that Argentina’s economy is unstable and fluctuates frequently, whereas the unreliability of laws raises concerns about investors’ rights in this country.
Brazil is the largest IT development market in South America, offering reasonable pricing, highly professional developers, and impressive IT infrastructure. Some major disadvantages include the tax system: taxation in Brazil is very complex and counts a lot of components. Take into consideration the extended 14-month salary that Brazilian employees have (one extra month of vacation pay plus the “décimo terceiro,”or bonus paid to all employees),
as well as many additional charges and tolls, applied not just to earnings but to, for example, consumption of energy too.
Eastern Europe
Customers from all over the world are increasingly turning their eyes towards the countries of Eastern Europe, being even not embarrassed by programmers’ rates that are a bit higher here than in the regions described above.
The high level of English proficiency, strong qualifications, and the complexity of the projects they are able to work with are the curtain assets of local engineers. All this makes them equal competitors to colleagues from markets with significantly higher labor costs.
Let’s take Poland, which has the largest working population in Europe, with over 300,000 IT professionals. Polish programmers are ranked first in Java tests and top five in other programming languages.
As for Romania, it has 116,000 programmers, and it is worth knowing that to stimulate the industry, the government introduced a zero-income tax for software developers and specialists working in research laboratories.
You may try to outsource IoT developers in Bulgaria, as their government is betting on nearshoring in an effort to offer the cheapest tech services to the neighboring countries. The location of Eastern European countries makes hiring IoT software engineers here an ideal choice for customers from Europe, while the 10-hour time difference with Canada or the United States gives them a head start compared to American contractors.
During the last decade, Ukraine has become one of the best countries for IT outsourcing in the world. The most notable surge in the industry occurred within the last three years, when the average annual growth did not fall below the rate of 20-30%, both in terms of revenue and the number of IT developers. In 2021, the IT services market size reached $6.8 billion, ensuring almost 40% of the country’s total export earnings.
Why do investors think it is a good idea to outsource internet of things development services in Ukraine, and how has the current war-like situation affected its attractiveness for employee search? Here is a short answer.
The booming industry in spite of the war
Around 285 thousand specialists work in the Ukrainian IT industry, which is the third largest in the country’s export volumes. In the first five months of 2022, IT received a record export income with a growth of 30% and became the only industry that did not show any decline during the war.
In February, when the Russian invasion happened, it took only a month for most Ukrainian software companies to move their employees to safe locations and restore all activities. According to the Ukrainian IT Association, 52% of companies retained 100% of contracts, 32%—90-99% of contracts, and only 16% lost about 10% of contracts.
Already now, we can see that the war has only strengthened programmers and IT companies in Ukraine. Look only how energetically they contribute to Ukraine’s future victory, not only by donating a significant part of their incomes but also with their technological expertise, volunteering in state projects, or cyber-army. The industry remains stable and strong, despite the troublesome time.
Impressively high level of IT education
Empowering IT education and searching for more opportunities here has become a top priority for both Ukrainian youth and the government. In comparison with neighboring countries, the number of developers per capita remains quite low, which means that their number will continue to grow.
In 2022-2025, at least 80 thousand IT specialists will receive a bachelor’s degree. Non-formal and corporate education keep up flourishing together with university studies: IT schools, courses, and corporate programs from IT companies are very popular.
According to the IT Association of Ukraine, the non-formal education sector ensures now approximately 10-12 thousand new specialists per year, and in a couple of years, this number may grow to 20-25 thousand. This may push the number of qualified engineers by even more than 180 thousand.
You may judge the quality of Ukrainian IT education by the complexity and wide range of technological tasks that local programmers undertake. Their reliability is provided by the strong training base: among currently working developers, 87% have higher education (one or more), almost 60% have a STEM specialty, 5% are still undergoing specialized training, 2% have a scientific degree (mainly among Hardware Engineers, specialists in Data Science CTO /CEO). Add to this that Ukrainian universities occupy high positions in world rankings, and recently 11 of them were included in the list of the best in the world according to QS World University Rankings.
Deep technical expertise in numerous industries
A large domestic market in Ukraine paves the way for the appearance of all kinds of technological start-ups, and there are now more than 5,000 of them. It means that developers got all opportunities to polish their skills in various areas, be it mobile or web development, UX/UI design, quality control and testing, R&D services, IT consulting services, big data and analytics, and IoT technologies.
Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Mercedes, Tesla, PayPal, Cisco, IBM, SAS, Pfizer, Atlassian, Travelport, OpenText belong to the list of global companies that have ordered software services in Ukraine, and this impressive array keeps expanding.
More than 80% of Ukrainian IT specialists say they know more than 1 IoT programming language, and 30% have significant experience in using more than two. In Ukraine, it is possible to find high-quality specialists not only in such popular languages as JavaScript, C#, Java, PHP, but also in rarer ones such as Ruby, Swift, PayScale.
Reasonable cost for high value (plus government support)
Ukrainian developers’ hourly rate fluctuates between 19-60 dollars. So if you are hiring IoT developers in Ukraine, between seniority level these numbers will be distributed as follows:
Junior Software Engineer $19 – $25 per hour.
Middle Software Engineer $26 – $38 per hour.
Senior Software Engineer $39 – $60 per hour.
This is the lowest pay level in the region (based on middle-level):
Poland – $45 – $69 per hour
Czech Republic $39 – $58 per hour
Hungary $44 – $57 per hour
Romania $35 – $51 per hour
Bulgaria $39 – $56 per hour
Belarus $33 – $48 per hour.
Croatia $32 – $63 per hour
Saying nothing of rates in Western Europe and America, let’s compare the monthly salaries of JavaScript developers:
USA—from $6800
UK — from $5032
Switzerland—from $6280
Israel — from $4000
Ukraine — from $1600
As government supports the industry in Ukraine, IT professionals receive a number of tax incentives, such as lower income tax rate than employee taxes in other sectors.
Thus, if you hire IoT development teams in Ukraine, you get the same benefits as in many others European countries, like a high level of English proficiency, convenient time zone and geographic location, but also a number of additional benefits.
So, involving a distributed team means that you expand your business capabilities by adding developers and managers located in other regions. A dedicated IoT app development team is fully immersed into the client’s project, working full time. You as the customer usually have direct access to each software developer that you outsource.
The structure of such a team varies depending on your business needs. Anyway, your IoT developers need to be capable to lead you through every step of the delivery, from prototyping to development and post-delivery support.
As only one of the hundreds of possible examples, the composition of the simplest team may be as follows:
– 1+ Developer(s) whose specialization depends on the requirements of the project (backend, mobile);
– Hardware engineer, if you need to work with hardware;
– Embedded developer, if you need to write firmware for the microcontroller;
– QA Engineer;
– Project Manager.
The number of people depends on the scale of the project, the required time frame and your budget.
Be responsible in choosing a development service provider, just as you would in choosing an equal partner for your business. Here are some tips on the steps you should take to select the right partner.
Decide on a set of technical requirements
for the product and therefore a stack of technologies used to create your product. It will be good if you take part in compiling an IoT developer job description to find the very specialist you need.
What are the technical details to pay attention to?
“One of the less obvious competencies that can greatly speed up development is the ability to work with the integration of various third-party APIs. The Internet of Things is always a complex set of technologies, and numerous functions have already been implemented previously by different companies. All that developers have to do in such cases is to implement them into your product. It’s not easy and not everyone can do it. When searching for our candidates, we pay great attention to this.
A big plus for developers is the knowledge of data transfer protocols. From basic HTTP to more specific modbus, RS-485, KNX, I2C and others, depending on the technologies used on the project. The ability to work with data transfer protocols allows developers to make software and physical devices friends much faster, which leads to a reduction in development costs.
Knowledge of web + mobile development is also important, if the project involves the simultaneous use of a web and mobile application. This combination allows to integrate the product for different platforms” — Yegor Fedorov, an IoT solution architect of Webbylab noticed.
Don’t forget to keep your eyes on, too:
– network technologies such as Ethernet, TCP/IP, Zigbee, and Bluetooth
– hardware engineering (if there is no such expertise, you will have to look for a separate partner for designing devices and sensors)
– involving an UI/UX designer and product manager and other competencies.
Confirm experience
Ask a potential partner to showcase completed IoT-related projects, preferably in the same sectors that your product is intended for.
Approve the cost limit
and the desired timeline for the development process. Get step-by-step information from the partner on the development stages, as well as agree in advance on additional services for support and maintenance of the product. Agree on the timing and testing parameters to be able to correct errors if they occur immediately.
Interviews the best candidates
This way you can determine if the employee fits your corporate culture, if this is important to you, as well as assess their soft skills: project management, business intelligence and language proficiency.
We suggest you read: Internet of things (IoT) in consumer electronics market: 5 Use Cases of 2023
Read also: Impact of IoT Technology on Education in 2023
Webbylab has an 12-year history of software development, and we have been developing IoT projects for 3 years. That is why our engineers meet all the requirements described above, and by contacting us, you will receive a reliable long-term partnership with the access to top-class technical specialists.
WebbyLab programmers have extensive expertise in IoT development, in particular such areas as Smart Home Automation Platforms Development, IoT mobile apps, Embedded development, Prototyping.
A team of 12 people has been working on the creation of the IoT 2smart Cloud IoT platform. During these years we have delivered about 10 IoT projects, both hardware and software.
We work with Z-wave, Zigbee, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, KNX, Modbus hardware stacks. Event based architecture, reactive user interfaces, security, and performance optimization for low-end hardware, provisioning, integration with 3rd party platforms like Alexa skills, Google Voice – it’s just a little piece of what we’re dealing with.
We are also experienced in prototyping, as we know that new IoT product cannot be launched without it. The idea of prototyping is to quickly build IoT devices using many off-the-shelf components (MCUs, sensors and other hardware) before launching real manufacturing. Usually, we use ESP32, Arduino and Raspberry Pi boards for prototypes.
WebbyLab software engineers never limit their development to narrow-profile expertise. They are familiar with business requirements’ analysis, valuation process, are able to share knowledge and train other team members. Whatever your business objectives and your requests about the skills and competencies of IoT specialists would be, we definitely find a way to meet them. We also could be your reasonable choice if you want to hire an IoT consultant who can help with your IoT product strategy, or hire a Ukrainian IoT developer. Contact us and we will find the best solution for you.
Written by:
Head of IoT at Webbylab
Kostiantyn started his career in IT at Webbylab, where he quickly grew from the position of a tester to the role of a manager and business analyst. When the company’s management decided to develop the IoT direction, Kostia became one of its key figures.
The average number of days between the time you initially post a job for a software engineer and the date you hire him is 35. But that only applies to a typical developer who’s hired for a very basic position. If you require an IoT developer with particular skills, as it more often occurs, your hiring time could be 8-12 weeks or even more. You don’t waste too much time on searching for experienced employees with the required profile, if you make agreement with outsourcing vendor.
The rate varies much depending on region. For example, JavaScript developer earns in average $6800 per month in the USA, $4000 in Israel and $1600 in Ukraine/ Pricing differs due to the uneven level of economic development of countries, which affects the labor market and the standard of living. At the same time, the technical level of programmers varies from country to country, too. To hire the best team for an IoT project, you need to compare the benefits and risks of each country in terms of IT development and choose the best balance between price and quality. Outsourcing saves your costs on talent acquisition and retention.
We advise you to use the services of such trusted portals as Clutch or Top Tech Biz, which provide not only data on the best IT companies, but also objective assessments of the specialists who contacted them. You can also use the search for candidates on LinkedIn, GitHub, Hired, AngelList, CrunchBoard platforms.
The structure and number of specialists in your team vary depending on your business needs and the scale of the project. Anyway, if you hire remote IoT developers, they are to be able to lead you through every step of the delivery, from prototyping to development and post-delivery support. If you have a small start-up, at the initial stage it could have a developer (one or more), hardware engineer, embedded developer, or QA engineer.
Decide on a set of technical requirements for the product and therefore a stack of technologies used to create your product. Ask a potential partner to showcase completed IoT-related projects, preferably in the same sectors that your product is intended for. Approve the cost limit and the desired timeline for the development process. Get step-by-step information from the partner on the development stages, as well as agree in advance on additional services for support and maintenance of the product. Interviews the best candidates, assessing their soft skills.
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