How to hire TypeScript developers: Skills, rates and interview tips

Looking for TypeScript developers to hire? Here are some tips regarding assessing their skills, conducting screening and technical interviews, as well as some general information about the technology itself.

Stefanija Tenekedjieva

Stefanija Tenekedjieva

Egzon Gollopeni

Egzon Gollopeni

How to hire TypeScript developers: Skills, rates and interview tips

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Find a TypeScript developer

Typescript is an open-source object-oriented programming language that is JavaScript-based and has the additional feature of static typing. It is developed and maintained by Microsoft and it’s used both for frontend and backend development.

Typescript can be used to simplify JavaScript code, create UIs, fix problems, and define overloaded functions, among other things.

Because TypeScript is simple to read and compatible with JavaScript libraries, as well as usable in fullstack development, it is one of the most sought-after skills in developers.

Both supply and demand in TypeScript are fairly high, but it is hard to find a dedicated developer with many years of experience in this technology and other related frameworks that your company might need during the development process.

In order to help you find the right developer, here are some facts and helpful tips that’ll speed up your hiring process.

TypeScript developers and their rates

There are fullstack, backend and frontend developers that work with TypeScript. According to the 2022 Stack Overflow report, TypeScript was the fifth most popular technology in the category “Programming, scripting and markup languages”, with 34.83% of 71.547 professional developers voting for it in their response.

Typescript made it to the third spot in languages that developers love working in, presumably because it is also one of the highest-paying ones with a median salary of $59.172.

As for our base of developers, we have more than 300 vetted (and technically tested) members with great English skills, for which the charging rates range between 18 and 30 dollars per hour.

Tips for your TypeScript developers’ interviews

Not sure where to start with checking the experience and tech skills of your candidates? Here are our best practices and advice.

Prescreens

A prescreen is an interview in which you generally filter out the fitting candidates from the ones that don’t come across as professional or might not fulfill all the requirements. It is less focused on technical skills and more on finding someone with a personality that would fit in your culture.

Our Head of Recruitment Nadya Pokhyla uses a practical approach to scoring candidates in pre-screens with a useful scorecard.

Scorecard for pre-screens

"I pay high attention to their professionalism, self-presentation and communication skills; as well as motivation, enthusiasm, English-speaking skills and many other important points we evaluate during pre-screen. I like to ask myself this question: ‘Would I work with this person as a colleague?‘"

author Nadya Pokhyla

Talent Acquisition specialist Evgenia Kashchuk adds:

"After conducting a lot of interviews, I can say that the main non-technical skills are presentability (everything starts with a call with a recruiter), openness, sociability, honesty, curiosity, flexibility."

author Evgenia Kaschuk

Technical interview

We asked frontend developer Egzon Gollopeni about what are the most important technical skills a great TypeScript developer should possess.

"They should know and have experience in working with C# or Java, because they have a lot in common with TypeScript. They also need to know about design patterns, testing, modules, interfaces, inheritance, classes."

author Egzon Gollopeni

Egzon adds that a good TypeScript developer should know JavaScript, but not necessarily Java or the other technology. However, when it comes to complexity, performance, good infrastructure and mini frameworks inside of a project—it might be difficult without this skill.

The technical interview should focus on answering the question if your developer has these technical skills or not.

Top soft skills for developers

When asked about the most important soft skills his peers should possess, Egzon lists problem-solving, teamwork, inquisitiveness and the ability to ask for help from teammates as his top picks.

Some other qualities that our HR team always considers when hiring are:

  • Clear and professional communication approach;
  • Upper-Intermediate or higher English level;
  • Ability to get on well with any team;
  • Leadership ambitions;
  • Ability to support and mentor the junior colleagues;
  • Punctuality when it comes to attending the meetings or completing the tasks on time.

Interview questions to ask

Here’s what Egzon himself asks interviewees to nail down their level of experience and tech stack:

"As a developer, I have been working a long time with TypeScript and JavaScript, and I always ask why we need to use TypeScript. That way I will know how much they know about it."

Some other things you can ask them are:

  1. What are the benefits of using TypeScript?

Expected answer: It gives strong static typing, the compiler alerts developers to type related mistakes, so they don’t add the changes in the production phase; it helps reduce errors and makes better performance during execution.

  1. How long have they been using TypeScript?

What to expect: Ideally, at least one year.

  1. Why use TypeScript instead of other JavaScript-based technologies?

Expected answer: In short, the TypeScript code is more reliable and easier to refactor, making it easier for me as a developer to avoid errors and create rewrites easily.

  1. What are primitive types in TypeScript?

Expected answer: String, number, and boolean are the three primitive types in TypeScript that are often used. These correspond to the JavaScript types with a similar name.

  1. What is any type?

Expected answer: Sometimes, you need to save a value in a variable, but you are unsure of the type of the variable beforehand. For instance, the value could originate from a user input or an API call. You can give any kind of value to a variable of type any by using the "any" type. When a variable's type is not explicitly specified, and the compiler cannotdetermine it from the context, TypeScript believes the variable is of type any.

  1. What is an unknown type?

Expected answer: Unknown type is the type-safe opposite of every type. The unknown can be assigned to anything, but it can only be assigned to itself and any if a type assertion or control-flow-based narrowing is carried out. Without first asserting or constricting a variable to a more precise type, you cannot conduct any operations on it.

  1. How can you create objects in TypeScript?

Expected answer: Objects are collections of keys and values that resemble dictionaries. The keys must be special. They are sometimes referred to as associative arrays and are comparable to arrays. While an object lets you use any other type as the key, an array uses numbers to index the values. Any value with properties is referred to as an object type in TypeScript.

  1. Explain null and its use in TypeScript.

Expected answer: A null value in programming denotes the absence of value. A null variable has no object it points to. The 'null' keyword in TypeScript designates the null value.

  1. How do arrays work in TypeScript?

Expected answer: Arrays are collections of values that are indexed and ordered. To store values of the same kind, we use arrays. The first element has index 0, the second has index 1, and so on because the indexing starts at 0.

  1. What is an interface?

Expected answer: An interface in TypeScript is an abstract type that informs the compiler of the possible property names for a given object. Implicit interfaces are created when you declare an object with properties in TypeScript. It begins by using TypeScript's type inference capabilities to examine the object's property name and data type.

What sets apart a great TypeScript developer?

Apart from being fluent in their primary technology, a great TypeScript developer should know and have worked with C# or Java because they have a lot in common with TypeScript. On top of that, they should be able to know about design patterns, testing, modules, interfaces, inheritance and classes.

Some of the extra tech stacks that can make them invaluable team members are having knowledge of React, Angular or Vue, and frontend UI libraries such as Tailwind, ChakraUi or MaterialUi.

Why should you hire a TypeScript developer?

“Because if you invest early in TypeScript developers and projects, you can have great performance, faster and more efficient development, as well as improvement of code transparency, making it easier for new developers when you have them on board," says Egzon.

Talented TypeScript developers available now

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Find a TypeScript developer

Why use TypeScript?

TypeScript is a programming language developed and open-sourced by Microsoft in 2012. It builds on and compiles to regular JavaScript using the TypeScript compiler or Babel. The language can run client-side or server-side in Deno or Node.js runtime environments.

  • What is the difference between TypeScript and JavaScript?

    TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript, which means it has all the features of JS and adds static type definitions on top of that. The main benefits of TypeScript’s type system are that it helps to validate the code as you type it in your code editor, which reduces the number of bugs and makes the development of JavaScript apps more efficient.

  • How does TypeScript work?

    TypeScript integrates with several JS code editors, such as Visual Studio, Nova, Atom, Sublime Text, Emacs, Vim, WebStorm, and Eclipse. It provides language services that enable type-checking and autocompletion tools in them. Being empowered by TypeScript, code editors analyze code, spot mistakes, and add types available in the open-source library of type declaration files.

  • What is TypeScript used for?

    TypeScript is used for building large-scale JS applications to speed up development and ease maintenance of extensive codebases. In such projects, TypeScript is used instead of regular JS because it saves time on catching errors and simplifies code refactoring. It makes development more secure because, with the validation made when TypeScript code is compiled into JavaScript, all bugs get fixed before the final JS code is executed.

  • Who uses TypeScript?

    Alongside Microsoft that uses TypeScript for building its own applications, many companies running large-scale web apps, such as Airbnb, Slack, and Asana, have migrated their JS codebases to TypeScript. Apart from that, TypeScript is used by Google to build the Angular framework, which means apps that are built with Angular use TypeScript.

  • Can you use TypeScript in React?

    TypeScript is compatible with JSX and can be used in React apps. Create React App supports TypeScript out-of-the-box. You can either create a new project with TypeScript or add it to an existing project. Using TypeScript with React requires adding it as a dependency to your project and configuring the TypeScript compiler.

  • Is Typescript easier than JavaScript?

    Given that JavaScript takes at least one year of full dedication to learn fluently, learning TypeScript would roughly take the same amount of time. For some, it might be easier if they’re starting from scratch. For others, the previous familiarity of object oriented programming will be preferred to master TypeScript quicker than otherwise. All things considered, the difficulty of learning (and using) TypeScript would be the same compared to JavaScript or any other programming language.

  • Pros and cons of TypeScript

    The advantages of TypeScript are multiple. TypeScript is an open-source and statically typed scripting language. Type-related mistakes are caught during the compilation phase, so the code becomes less error-prone. TypeScript is also predictable in the sense that everything stays the same as it was initially defined. For example, a variable defined as a string will always be a string and won’t change to a boolean value. Thirdly, you can easily spot the design intent of the developers that wrote the TypeScript code. This type of self-expressive code is colloquially referred to as “syntactic sugar”. One caveat of TypeScript is the addition of an extra step called transpiling, which requires to transpile the TypeScript code to JavaScript code before you run it.

  • Why is TypeScript here to stay?

    TypeScript is definitely here to stay. It’s constantly evolving and adding new improvements to its already robust paradigm. The introduction of a new type-only syntax enables greater control over how the compiler handles some elements in the code. On top of that, the community behind TypeScript is very supportive and hard-at-work optimizing the language to achieve better performance across the board (both applicable for large projects and small ones). Gone are the days of writing code in plain JavaScript when the combined power of JS and TypeScript performs much, much better.

  • What is Enum in TypeScript?

    In TypeScript, Enums stands for Enumerations. It’s a relatively new data type that defines a set of named constants (const enums), otherwise known as a collection of related values. TypeScript supports string-based and numeric enums. Heterogenous enums are enums that contain both numeric and string values and are typically used to leverage the JavaScript runtime behavior. Reverse mapping is also supported by TypeScript enums, which means that you can both access any enum member’s value and also access their name from the member’s value as well.

  • Does Typescript have sets or lists?

    TypeScript supports sets. Sets are novel data structures that have been added to the ES6 version of JavaScript (TypeScript compiles to JavaScript). Sets help in storing distinct data values that show up only once into lists that are available in other languages such as Java, C#, and more. Sets are similar to maps, but they can’t store key-value pairs—they can only store keys. The objects inside a set are a group of values, so In TypeScript, you must go through them in a particular order. You can also iterate through set values with the ‘for’ and ‘of’ loop command. On the other hand, lists are loosely considered parts of the runtime functionality. TypeScript is not meant to solve these types of challenges, but you can easily solve this by using JavaScript arrays instead.

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