Web developers, without a doubt, require a high level of basic technical expertise and soft skills. When it comes to recruiting a web developer, however, candidates' business intelligence and embedded analytics skills are equally crucial as their basic technical abilities.
You might want to reconsider how you screen jobseekers to prevent the hefty expenses of a bad hire. We’ve put together ten of the top business intelligence and embedded analytics interview questions for web developers in this guide.
Key Characteristics of a Web Developer
It's not always that outstanding programming knowledge translates into a fantastic hire. While having a well-versed technical mind is beneficial, there is more to becoming a great web developer than that. When choosing a professional to handle your web development and business intelligence needs, keep the following qualities in mind:
- A passion for knowledge.
- The ability to be part of a team.
- Problem-solving.
- The ability to plan for anything.
- Debugging skills.
- A sense of business.
- A passion for learning new things.
- Great communication skills.
- Patience and perfectionism.
- Deep knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and other vital coding languages.
- Time management skills.
- Testing skills.
Now that we understand what makes a good web developer let’s dive into some important questions during an interview.
What to Ask Your Potential Web Developer
Do you build your dashboards, reporting, and business intelligence features or integrate them?
This is a particularly useful question when hiring a web developer to integrate BI tools for embedded analytics. Ideally, your prospect should answer that they buy and build, depending on the specific use cases of the tools they are working with. A good web developer will be well-versed enough in BI to build such features from scratch.
Are you familiar with integrating APIs as a web developer?
APIs are a vital aspect of web development and business intelligence, as they deliver information or data from a server. They may use an API to get data from the database and save data back to the database and provide an interface for websites and client apps to access data.
Ensure that your prospect is well-versed in API integration and development, especially if they work with embedded analytics. A good web developer should always be familiar with this like the back of their hand.
Are you experienced with front-end UI and UX development?
This is a very good question to ask if you want to take a headless approach to your embedded analytics project. Your application’s user interface and experience are of the utmost importance, especially if your product includes embedded analytics or is used for business intelligence purposes.
Your prospect should have experience with this type of development as well as front-end experience. As a good developer, your experience in front-end UI and UX development will help you gain an edge over the competition.
Are you familiar with data visualizations and embedding techniques?
When implementing embedded analytics into an application, the product that is being integrated must be highly visual. Your prospect should have experience developing new embedding techniques as well as data visualizations in this context. A good web developer should always be familiar with the common data visualization techniques. It is even better if they know some complicated ones your company can use for your future projects.
How do you stay up to date on the newest web development trends?
To put it simply, this will indicate whether your prospect continues to learn to program and makes an attempt to keep their abilities up to date. You may, for example, inquire about your prospect’s favorite programming-related Twitter accounts and why they enjoy them.
If your prospect doesn't use Twitter, find out what tech journals they read, which writers or developers they appreciate, and why. Because web development is continually evolving, especially when it comes to BI, it's a positive indicator if you're interested in learning about the current trends and generating opinions about them.
What are a few of your most valuable soft skills?
It would help if you were searching for a problem solver, a great communicator, or someone eager to learn new things. Request examples of how they can exhibit this expertise and use this information to assess whether or not this is the right match for you. You might emphasize some soft skills above others, depending on the nature of the work you’re hiring for.
Let’s say you can't figure out how to address a code issue for a business intelligence solution. What steps do you take to discover the answer?
Do you consult a coworker, Stack Overflow, or other online resources? There is no right or wrong solution in this situation. Combining a few solutions may be the best option. When presented with an issue, it's good to examine whether your candidate chooses to keep their head down or ask around.
How do you feel about pair programming? Have you ever tried it?
Although this agile development approach isn't always appropriate for day-to-day work, it's a good idea to see if your prospect is willing to sit down with a colleague and look over your code. This is especially the case for programming for business intelligence and embedded analytics.
In your opinion, is it a good idea to allocate memory statically or dynamically on systems with major memory size constraints?
On devices with memory capacities in the low kilobytes and lower, static memory allocation is preferred. When employing dynamic memory allocation, data overhead, CPU overhead, and memory fragmentation can all be pretty intense problems when utilizing dynamic memory allocation.
What visualization components and toolkits have you used in the past?
Most developers with experience in the BI industry have worked with a lot of the big players in the industry. We’re not talking about end-user tools like Power BI or Tableau, and we’re referring to the components that developers use to facilitate visualizations. Names like Telerik, ComponentOne, DevExpress, Highcharts, Infragistics, Synfusion, and more. An experienced developer would also name various open-source components such as D3 and Chart.js.
Thus, web developers should have the necessary knowledge to see if they are a great fit for your company’s needs.
Hire the Best Web Developer Today
It is not enough to have a web developer who has a decent line of experience, a clean resume, or a determination to learn. Time is gold in many businesses, and as much as possible, it is the best to hire who rises from the rest of the pack. However, hiring the best web developer is one thing, but using their skills, knowledge, and expertise to make your business thrive and prosper is another.
How Can Yurbi Help With Business Intelligence and Embedded Analytics Development?
Well, first, let’s be clear, we’re a software product, not a staffing firm or development agency. So we’re not here to replace your development team.
But we do offer “Done For You” services to help augment and accelerate your BI goals.
The biggest help that Yurbi can be is to save your developers time. There’s always the build vs. buy decision for embedding analytics. Do you spend the time and hire the developer to build a custom-built BI offering, or do you partner with a BI vendor that specializes in and knows what customers expect and let them do the heavy lifting for you?
Yurbi is an embedded BI platform that gives you the bells and whistles you need, at a price you can afford. And it gives you the APIs and methods where a savvy developer can integrate it into your existing project within a fraction of the time it takes to build.
And if you require help, our team can deliver.
To learn more, contact us, and let’s discuss your requirements and get that newly hired developer a new task, to integrate Yurbi (quickly).