If you wish to power up your data department, investing in R development is one of the best choices you have. According to the 2020 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, this programming language is used by approximately 5.5% of professional developers around the world. R is, then, the most popular fully data-focused language, used more often than similarly targeted Scala or Julia.
Because of its roots in academia, R is still very often taught at universities where the next great data scientists are born. But because of all its great features, including great performance and perfect tools for analytics and data mining, R also found its home in businesses that wish to make their decisions more data-driven. And as R works amazingly for machine learning and AI development as well, its future is bright.
But how to hire R software developers who can deliver results important from a business standpoint? In our guide below, we explain exactly what you need to look for during the hiring process.
All the hard skills your R developers need to know
While recently R became quite a popular and recognizable language, attending a bootcamp or following an online course is very rarely enough to thrive as a professional R developer. So what skills your candidate should exactly have? We listed all the most important ones below.
- Extensive knowledge with R and another data language
R is one of these programming languages that are considered easy to get into but hard to master. Many students across different majors are taught the basics of R to run calculations and implement simple automation processes, but such basic knowledge is not enough to thrive in real IT development. That’s why, when you decide to hire R developers, you want to onboard someone with professional experience in utilizing R for the sake of business projects.
Knowledge of any other data language, such as Python or Scala, is also beneficial as it expands the possibilities of what the developer can achieve.
- Grasp of all the data operations you require
Depending on your company’s unique needs, you might want to hire R developers focused on different areas of working with data. While some companies hire R developers as data analysts who can deliver reliable forecasts and visualizations, other businesses want separate experts for data mining. Most often, however, you’ll end up looking for generalists — someone who has experience with both getting the data from multiple sources as well later analyzing and visualizing it.
- Experience with popular R frameworks and libraries
There have been numbers of frameworks and libraries created with R in mind — many of them serve completely different functions, meaning an R developer needs to have experience in at least a few to truly leverage the power of the language. For example, ggplot2 is one of the most popular libraries for data visualization, expanding the already impressive base visualization features of R; Lubridate helps with the process called data wrangling (making raw data more applicable for analytics), and RCrawler simplifies web scraping.
- Experience with automation
Machine learning, AI, and other related areas of automation are the future and they are directly bound to the world of data. That’s why it’s definitely beneficial for you to hire R developers with experience with these concepts, so you can implement them in your company in the near future.
- Understanding of complex mathematics
Operations on data require deep knowledge of complex maths, including areas like statistics and algorithms. It’s even more important if you want to hire R developers for the sake of machine learning development.
Soft skills to consider when hiring R developers
While working on data with R might sound like a strictly technical job, linked directly to the rules of maths, being a successful R developer still requires a set of soft skills. What skills exactly are we talking about?
- Attention to details
One small mistake in code might lead to a complete change of results an R script provides. To make sure that the data provided is truly reliable and can be used for business forecasting purposes, R developers should, then, always triple check all their code.
- Understanding of the importance of visualization
Some data people can look at raw data or a sheet filled with numbers and already understand their meaning. However, an R developer should be aware that every decision-maker in the company must also be able to easily understand this data. That’s why being able to provide attractive visualizations and reports on the findings is crucial in such a role.
- Focus on team play
Nearly every process an R developer can be involved in will require collaboration with teams across the business. From working with non-dev teams on understanding their data needs to cooperating with back-end developers in data mining to reviewing the results alongside an IT project manager — passion for working in a team is simply a must for every data expert, such as an R developer.
Questions to ask when you hire R software developer
Just looking at a resume and portfolio isn’t enough — a proper technical interview is crucial to understanding your candidate’s proficiency in R and how well they will fit your project. If you are not a data expert yourself, we recommend asking one to join you during the interview. If there is no data-focused professional available, you might also work with software consultants and IT project managers.
What questions can be asked when you want to check the hard skills of an R developer?
- How would you explain the difference between L1 and L2 regularization?
- How would you transfer 1.000.000+ gigabytes log files into a database?
- What are your go-to ETL tools for R? Why these?
- What does it mean to prune a decision tree?
- How can you prevent overfitting?
- What’s Gaussian distribution? Give an example of data with non-Gaussian distribution.
- What’s chartjunk and how to avoid it?
- How can you facet data with ggplot2?
- What are your go-to packages for data mining with R? Why these?
- What are Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors?
How to assess a company fit?
Don’t limit yourself to just checking the skills of your R developer candidates. For the best results from day one, review also how well they actually fit your company and the team they will be joining. Consider the two areas of the company fit…
- Industry fit
Understanding of the business needs and goals unique to your market, experience with your target customer group, knowledge of data sources useful for you — you could get all this and more if you hire R software developers who have previously worked in companies within your industry.
- Company culture fit
Improved cooperation, a boost of innovation, and great teamwork from your new hire’s day one at work — these are the great results a match between your candidate’s and your company’s values can bring. Company culture fit areas you should consider include the approach to remote work, preferred style of management, working hours flexibility, approach to diverse teams, and any other value you consider important for the success of your business.
Who else you might need?
Depending on your business’ unique needs and goals, as well as on the company’s size, you might want to hire other data specialists as well. These could be data scientists, data engineers, AI experts, machine learning engineers, Neural Network developers, or other related professionals.
Whatever your data needs are, Ideamotive can help you get the right people on board. We run an industry-leading network of professionals from all areas of IT — from web developers and designers to Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches to all the data people you might think of. And what’s more, we will connect you only with the experts who truly fit your project and company.
Get in touch with us today and make your business more data-driven.
