Author: Abulfaz Ahmadov

 

 

Today, the idea that “every company needs to become a software company” is considered almost a cliché. Marc Andreessen penned his famous “Why Software Is Eating the World” essay in The Wall Street Journal five years ago. Nowadays, all of the companies are becoming a software company, the software revolutionized almost every industry, starting with taxi ordering and flights booking ending with food delivery. Even the most conservative industries, companies automate a lot of processes, analyze the market, improve customer service all with the piece of code.

Thus, there is a great demand in software developers and here are two ways to go, the first one, you can set up an in house team or outsource to nearshore or offshore provider. Both these approaches have some pros and cons.

Most people are inclined to prefer in house team and it’s quite natural. You have your team in front of you just sitting in one office, it’s easier to set up a communication, you manage directly everything that is happening. All in all, you can grab some bear on Friday with your mates!

On the other hand, it’s quite hard to find a candidate quickly, it takes some time and costs quite a lot. On average it takes up to 3 months to find the right software developer you need and 10-15 000 USD per hire if you ask a recruitment company to help you. What is interesting, the company spends a similar amount of money even if they hire on their own and it looks like the scarce in developers grows because the demand grows – every company becomes a software company nowadays.

What about outsourcing to offshore or nearshore provider? It some advantages and disadvantages as well. The biggest risk here is to run into a poor-quality provider, that would fail your projects, waste your money and time, unfortunately, it happened to many companies and after the bad experience, they are inclined to avoid this idea.

But does it mean everything is so horrible with outsourcing your projects to another company? Not, because of there plenty of startups and enterprises that have an offshore development team that helped them to achieve their results, providing high-quality products, saving them a lot of costs and time. Let us just name a few companies that have remote teams in Ukraine: JustEat, Lebara, Here, JustAnswer, Thomas Cook, Daimler AG, Similar web and many others. Thus, it’s not the outsourcing bad, there are bad providers. If you chose a reliable partner – you are going to benefit a lot and build great products to win the market.

How to choose the right partner? First of all, not only the partner matters but also your approach and the model of cooperation. We at Mindecs believe that the best working model is a staff augmentation model when the company directly interviews all the developers suggested by the offshore staffing provider and manages the development process directly using talents provided by a software development partner. In other words, in this case, the company uses remote software developers provided by the third party, just like their regular full-time members and takes part in hiring, managing and controls every developer they are billed for. In this case, you will extend your team flexibly with remote developers, that would cost less than in house team, producing the same result and minimizing the risks.

When choosing a vendor, pay attention to the attitude they approach your request, the proposal they suggest. It’s a great idea to check for some feedback of existing customers and even talk to them directly to ask for their experience. If your company is not a big enterprise corporation, then it’s more reasonable to consider small and medium-size development houses, where you can talk to Founders directly and make sure if the company has the similar values with your company.

To sum up, companies should mix both in house and have a reliable offshore development partner to grow effectively and produce great products. You need an in house team and strong CTO, Tech leads in a house that can set up the development process and then you would grow your product team easily both in house and remotely just like many companies already do.

We at Mindecs, believe that the future of the work is remote. A lot of companies already provide an opportunity to work remotely, especially software development companies.

For example, it can take on average 2 months and 30 interviews to hire the right candidate in the USA, locally in your office. There is another option, like recruitment agency, with the fee of somewhere around 15% of the first year salary(15 000$). What is also interesting, on average software engineer works for the same company less than 2 years. For instance, an average engineer at Facebook works for 1 year and 11 months, for Uber it’s 1 year and 2 months. If we take into account these numbers.

On the other hand, companies can find great software engineers in another city remotely, or even another country remotely. Despite the fact many companies struggle to find the right candidates locally many of them are still not hire remotely because they are afraid of some aspects, like not knowing how to manage remote teams, we covered in one of our recent topics how to manage remote teams , and actually whether it’s remote or onsite you have to search and vet candidates what is also challenging.

How Mindecs help companies to hire top-quality developers with no recruitment fees?

We at Mindecs – constantly search and vet software developers around the world thoroughly on the most important tech and communication skills, and partner-up with companies who need software engineers suggesting them our best candidates, with no recruitment fee and flexible hourly contract with our Assured Quality Policy. Typically, our customers hire the first or second candidate we propose, so it leads to much less time on searching and screening, 2 months and 30+ screenings vs 1-2 weeks 1-2 interviews. In case we don’t have the right candidate, we search it in parallel with our partner company that requests that particular developer for free.

To help our partner companies to grow remotely, we provide our Assured Quality Policy. First, all of our developers are vetted professionals with proven experience. Second, with every developer we start with 2 weeks no risk trial period, you pay only if satisfied and provide this opportunity with our bi-weekly pay period. Third, we constantly communicate and review the performance of our candidates, together with the companies to help them grow.

We believe that the future of work is remote. At Mindecs, we try to make remote work safe and effective. Our onboarding process is simple, the company simply shares the requirements, we make our best to fill this position. Mindecs takes all the risks out of the game, helping companies to build world-class product teams and bring excellent products on the market.

Toptal are the pioneers in the market of vetted professional freelance professionals. They were the first ones who came up with the idea of creating a network of vetted freelancers and the idea is really successful as their revenue exceeded 120m$ annually.
What do they offer? Toptal gives you access to their platform where you can get matched with the top 3% of freelancers in software engineering, design, finance, and law. All the professionals are vetted rigorously.

This is how the process looks like:

As you can see, the process is quite tough and only 3% of all the applicants claimed to pass the whole process.

Everything looks great and the company overall has good feedback from its customers according to Trustpilot, but there are no ideal companies and the most negative reviews about their pricing (typically it’s in the range 60-200 USD per hour) and too pushy sales reps.

Here is the list of few alternative ways to hire a freelancer that meets your expectations:

Upwork

One of the largest freelance platforms. It’s easy to use, you post your project description or job requirements and get tens and sometimes hundreds of different bids and spend a lot of time considering different profiles. There are a lot of positive and negative reviews on this platform, you need to chose the right freelancer and actually everything depends on the performer you choose because they are not pre-vetted and you have to vet them on your own.

You can hire both individuals or agencies that are ready to help you complete your project, the pricing depends on location/ seniority level of performers and can be somewhere between 10-150 USD per hour.

It’s worth to mention that the company provides now Upwork PRO – which is a platform for cooperation with businesses, where the company selected it’s most trusted agencies and freelancers.

Mindecs

Mindecs help companies to extend their teams with top-quality software developers. They are a network of vetted software developers, ready to join your team. Mindecs have similar vetting processes to Toptal and they are focused on the most popular niche developers like Node.js, Angular, Java, IOS, Android, etc. so that they can provide the best match in a matter of days.

What is interesting Mindecs has Guaranteed Quqality Policy what means you can be sure about the performance of the developer you requested because in case you are not satisfied you will not be invoiced, you pay only if satisfied.(read more here)

This allows companies to scale their team with confidence, they hire best developers as remote contractors with flexible terms of cooperation in a matter of days, not months as it takes on average. There are no recruitment fees.

If you are looking for scaling your development team with new developers, get in touch to receive few profiles for consideration and discuss everything more in detail.

 

Have you ever thought about how many coding languages are there? Actually, there are at least more than 600 coding languages, but not all of them are equally popular. Each of them has a specific thing that makes this language better for a certain type of solution to be provided. What is natural, the popularity of coding technologies changes as the types of apps and solutions we use change. It is based on trends. For example, currently, the demand in the web increases, while desktop apps decrease, big data and ML stuff grows rapidly, and so on.

Regarding TIOBE index, the most popular language nowadays is C, Java, and Python are among the top 3 as well. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third-party vendors. Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube, and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings.

We should take a look at Stackoverflow rating of programming languages

This index is based on topics and discussions activity at StackOverflow. What is interesting, Python is the second most loved coding language according to StackOverflow. Sometimes developer interest and employer demand do align, but not always.

According to Indeed – one of the most popular job boards in the USA, the list of most popular languages by job openings looks like:

We can notice, that the top 3 of software engineering languages by job openings are Python, Java, and Javascript. What is worth to mention, regarding indeed rating, Ruby is the best-paid skill for developers, that on average can make 134k. Swift developers make on average 125k per year and this is the second result, Python is the third with an average of 120k annually.

Conclusion

There are no good or bad coding languages. It’s as good as the developer is using the technology. Moreover, a good developer is not language-dependent, the good developer is efficient in the basics of computer science, knows at least a couple of different languages, and easily can get adopted to new technologies.
The same is for organizations and companies. When making a decision, you shouldn’t get stuck with the most popular or the most loved ones. You should choose the right tool for your solution. Don’t be afraid of growing your own expertise.

What is a company? The wikipedia-like definition is “A company is a legal entity formed by a group of individuals to engage in and operate a business—commercial or industrial—enterprise.” In short, it’s a group of people. The group has a market they operate on, their duties, goals to achieve both personal and individual, and all effort they put in are aimed at making more revenue and profit.

The better each member of the team is, the better overall performance of the team should be, it’s pretty logical, isn’t it? This is exactly what Jim Collins claims after his research on Great and just Good companies (According to his book, “Good to Great”). The great companies in the study all had leaders with characteristics described as “level 5 leadership”. They were humble, attributing success to luck or their teams, but accepting responsibility for failures. At the same time, they were resolved to do whatever was needed to become great. Great companies “get the right people on the bus, in the right seats”. They hire the best people, then figure out what to do with them (and with the company). This is one of the key concepts the author reveals to us.

According to these facts, recruitment process is an extremely important process for every company, but the truth is almost no one wants to spend time on recruitment. Another great author of one of the best-sellers “How to hire A-Players?” Eric Herrenkohl supports this idea. One of the main ideas of his book is nothing has a bigger impact on the results of your business and the quality of your life than hiring—and keeping—A-players. The difference between a business that fizzles and one that takes off is often whether the CEO knows how to hire and lead A-players. What is his definition of A-Player? An A-player is an employee who creates superior results compared to the vast majority of other people who hold the same position in your industry.

Another argument on why investing enough time on recruitment is it simply saves you a lot of time in the future and honestly, this is the only way of building a Great team. Here is a quote from Eric ” You can’t be a great leader if you are not a great recruiter. ” If you want to build an A-player team, you need to stop trying to turn poor performers into top performers and commit more time to finding and hiring A-players. Such talents have an exponential, not incremental, impact on your business.

Microsoft has more than 80,000 employees, but Bill Gates claims that the entire company was really built around fewer than 20 people. It doesn’t mean there are only 20 great talents in this company, no, probably all the people at Microsoft are great and are at the right seats. It means the founder needs such amount of top talents to create and maintain the culture of such a big and successful company. If he needs less than 20 people to become the wealthiest man in the world, just imagine what impact could just two or three true A-players can have on your company. As Barney Kister, senior vice president of sales and operations for Supplies Network, says, ‘‘You should never hire just to fill a position. You should always be looking for good people to add to your team.’’ If you start to think about recruiting only after a position has opened up, you have already lost. Don’t just fill empty roles. Define the team you need to achieve your goals. Then work constantly to put that team in place.

Just hiring top talents, could be not enough. As Jim Collins says about his research, you need to make sure, you have the right people at the right seats and don’t have the wrong people on the board. Simply having the best people is not enough. For sure, you need to create a proper culture, where they can fulfill their potential and grow. In such a company, A-players will beget more and more A-players. This is how great companies are built.

To sum up, to achieve great results, you definitely need great people. Otherwise, it’s not gonna work out. To build a great team you should keep these facts in mind:
1. Great leaders are great recruiters.
2. Time spent on recruitment of top talents will have the highest ROI for your business.
3. You need the right culture of growth, the right people in the right seats.
4. A-players have an exponential impact on your business, not just incremental.
5. Great talents beget great talents.

This is what we are about at Mindecs – we provide companies with top talents in tech to build great things. Products we build are used by big names. We are proud of our team. Feel free to get in touch with us, to get free advice on how to hire great software developers.

 

When you’re looking to outsource your web or mobile development, you’re tasked with finding the perfect partner. Ability to deliver, scope of services, and pricing are some of the many considerations you’re bound to face in assessing different providers.

Customer reviews can significantly simplify what can be a painstaking process. Testimonials are a proven method of building customer trust; they can vouch for service providers (like ourselves) and prove that we’re trustworthy partners capable of taking on your next project.

Clutch showcases such reviews. Clutch is a B2B ratings and reviews platform that showcases staffing research and content to help you make the best outsourcing decisions.

What’s more? Clutch just recognized us for being a top B2B provider in Ukraine!

We’re so thrilled to receive this award! Clutch’s robust and reliable methodology is applied to hundreds of regional service providers. Their team of researchers determined that we’re a top provider with a high satisfaction rate!

Mindecs provides tech teams with dedicated software developers who have experience in developing products for big names like Samsung, Mastercard, and more. We mostly serve SMEs, and our tech stack includes but isn’t limited to Node.js, Java, Angular, React, and VUE.

We take your software development needs seriously. We offer trial periods to assess our developers’ performance. That way, you’ll be sure that we’re the right partner before taking us on.

That being said, you’ll quickly become convinced of our development expertise.

Let’s look at what a previous partner had to say about our work on Clutch.

In this project, we helped a digital accessibility firm hire skilled developers. We provided scalable and flexible resources that grew to meet the needs of our client.

 

Our client was thrilled with our work!

So what are you waiting for? Engage us for your next project today!