Algorithm solving skills as best recruitment factor?

After founding Solidstudio, Pawel was an originator in terms of pursuing expertise in eMobility. With the build-up of a solid knowledge-base on industry’s needs & wants, he now keeps a close eye on products’ development. He’s also hugely responsible for the business’ side and designs the business models for our products.

Paweł Małkowiak

Recruiting developers for software house.

As a developer with 7 years’ worth of corporate experience, I have witnessed many different approaches in recruiting staff for software engineer positions. And these differing approaches apply to both sides of the table - as a candidate and recruiter. Obviously, every recruitment process is different, but I’ve tended to see a standard procedure of starting from only language-related, theoretical questions, to creating working, well designed solutions for assessments and ending with white-board algorithm solving problem sessions.

The candidate side is pretty straightforward; I came to this conclusion after several different meetings with startups, privately-held small business and leading technology giants. I’m pretty sure there are only two tasks for the candidate to concentrate on - presenting yourself in the best possible way and trying to obtain as much information about the company and the position.

Things get trickier on the other side of the table. I’ve always wanted to model how this process looks, but it’s not as straightforward as it sounds. Sure, there has to be plenty of discussion in it, but every interview is different and you can’t always stick to a script. And if you want to make changes to the recruitment procedure, these changes often have to go through an approval process to ensure they’re going to improve the experience. This can take time as it’s down to your employer, not you personally. However, I’m pretty sure that every recruiter (including myself) has thought, at some point, that if they were in charge they would do things differently.

Concentrating on this last sentence, we’re now getting closer to the key point of this article. For the last few months we’ve been running a 

 and we’ve been searching for new talents for our company. And this search left us pondering the question of: how do we create a good recruitment process which allows us to find the best candidates with the best skills who can start without any delays? The main conundrum was that we wanted to invest as little time as possible without a drop in quality and we wanted to find employees who could easily adapt to the ever changing work environment of a small software house.

Personally, I’m a fan of the whiteboard algorithm problem solving approach. Once a candidate passes it you can be pretty sure about their expertise. You can also understand their skills and ability to learn, not just their knowledge in a certain technology stack - which is a huge benefit from the point of view of a small company. An added bonus is that preparing for such a process involves solving a lot of similar tasks, so we can find a person that is not overly-attached to their code, which is another tick in the right box.

The more we thought about whether this was the best way forwards for our recruitment process, the more red flags we uncovered. All the advantages mentioned above certainly remain relevant, but there are other scenarios and questions to consider.

The ideal situation, of course, is to have a project with a starting date which is way off in the future so that you have time to find the right people for it. Projects that are not connected to any specific systems and allow you to use any technologies and tools you want. Green fields at its bests.

Even if the start date for a project is limited, you can still consider it as an achievable and fun project to work on. More often than not, new joiners need to adapt to an existing platform and this requires prior knowledge of the technologies being used. Moreover, the faster the individual is able to integrate and deliver, the more beneficial it is for the software house.

This demand for new starters to hit the ground running means that there’s no argument as to whether they should already be strongly coupled with existing frameworks. From a software house owner’s perspective, I simply can’t afford to recruit coders who may be highly talented, but come with no knowledge of SpringBoot and AWS platform. I’m sure that they could learn these platforms ridiculously quick, but there would still be a period of downtime to achieve this. When talking with potential clients, we like to differentiate ourselves from big companies by demonstrating our pace of delivery as our major selling point. And we can only provide this by recruiting employees with the ability to build production-ready solutions using all the tools and frameworks readily available.

After endless discussions, we came up with the following recruitment process. We decided that the first thing we need to understand is the applicant’s specific technology and language knowledge first. And by this we mean talking about theoretical discussions regarding Java, Spring, AWS and all that they entail. We call it stage one as our expectations here are not very high, a decent knowledge is enough and the candidates answers, at this point, are not going to guarantee them the job.

The next step - stage two - is the most important. It involves us preparing a coding task in a strongly technical domain. What we’re looking for here is for the candidate to solve the task with the best possible algorithm. Naturally, we’re also looking for a conscientious approach to code quality, test coverage, build system, logging etc. The correct usage of certain data structures along with the algorithms implemented are the key factors we look for when deciding if we will make a job offer. As we are also looking at the time factor when it comes to examining the solved task, we ask for the applicant to either provide a test suite that demonstrates the solution’s performance or we hold brief talks with the author about it prior to reviewing the code.

Finding the perfect balance is the issue we are still struggling with. We have changed our approach several times already and whilst it shows progress, I’m sure the current one will go through many changes yet. My main regret with this recruitment process is the possibility that we may miss out on great coders who simply don’t meet the demands of our specific frameworks.. I am hoping solidstudio.io will grow enough that, in the future, we will be able to give said coders a space to become the programmers we want. On the other hand, the major benefit is that a candidate that passes the process is ready to get started on day one with the tools and frameworks already in use. This allows us to keep pace with competitors – if not outpace them – and deliver a better experience to our clients.

For all algorithm solving questions and whiteboard session enthusiasts, we all need to remember that only delivered ideas matter. And these must be delivered with strong domain, architecture and framework knowledge.

Recruiting senior software developers by example.

 is always a challenge; this challenge can also grow depending on the candidate’s expertise. The technology involved in the role is not particularly important, what matters is the talent on offer from the candidate. If you know that only senior or exceptional skills are required then there’s one important question to ask yourself: do I really need to check their coding skills?

This, however, is a rather limited approach. Additionally, if this person has worked with the specific technology for several years, they must have succeeded in the recruitment process previously. Therefore, in this situation, how do you dig deeper and determine if the candidate in front of you is correct? Is there a particular approach you can take to uncover the candidate’s best qualities? And how can you encourage them to demonstrate the experience they have gained throughout their career?

As I can’t give definitive answers which will suit every software company, the only thing I can do is share my current approach for recruiting strong candidates for solidstudio.io.

A few weeks ago, I posted an article which looked at the pros and cons of testing algorithm skills in the recruitment process. In this new article, however, I want to look at whether designing a distributed system is a good task to set during an interview for a senior developer position. Everything here is based on my experience and the dozens of interviews I have conducted within our company.

Before we look at the required task, I just want to clarify why I feel that designing a distributed system is such a crucial skill. Sure, many people will state that the knowledge required can be learned relatively easily. However, I believe that listening to the candidate’s experience in building these systems provides a fantastic insight into their talents.

Let’s take a look at an example of my approach. In conceptual design, even the simplest problems may require highly sophisticated solutions. This is why I ask candidates to design straight-forward functionality:

Imagine you own a website that serves content to its users. Everything is there — content, design, security and scalability — so it’s now time to make some money! Your business model is to display sponsored links in a given section of the page. You get these links by fetching them from an external system — let’s call it system B. Once a user is logged in to your site, you need to ask System B for a link to be shown to this user. As time goes by, links change as the user’s preferences are likely to change as well.

System B will only pay for links to be displayed that are relevant to that individual user. Therefore, after showing the link, you need to update System B with information about user, link and timestamp. Now comes the tricky part: System B is not very reliable — sometimes it is available, sometimes it is partially available and sometimes it is not available at all. Your job is to maximise profit without exposing the failures of System B to your user.

The good thing about this task is that the amount of variation in solving it is almost endless. Moreover, you can see how candidates gather the required information regarding the system. If there is more than one recruiter in the room, one can be a product owner that verifies all assumptions and the other can be another developer to provide some healthy discussion about the system.

Now that we understand the task, let’s talk about the benefits of solving it during a recruitment session. We’ll start with technical feedback first:

- we can easily measure the experience of the candidate. The task also provides a simpler approach towards the quantity and quality of similar problems experienced in previous roles.

- the candidate’s approach to modern system designing is demonstrated and provides a vast insight into their methods. A candidate stuck with an MVC model has little to do, so this provides little insight.

- the solution can involve caching, queues, different kind of storages, synchronised and unsynchronised communication. These are all concepts which require a broad field of knowledge.

Solving this task can also help to uncover some insights about the candidate’s soft skills:

- mitigating developer or product owner role-playing can give provide an idea how the cooperation may work while working on actual projects.

- the more questions asked, the better. Gathering requirements, be they functional or non-functional, are critical in developing good software. A candidate that follows this approach has a greater chance of becoming a successful developer.

- embracing failure. In almost all the scenarios and solutions to the problem, there can be an issue that causes the designed system to fail or not meet the requirements. The manner in which a candidate reacts can give valuable insights about their work approach and how they handle tough situations.

The greatest benefit of this task is that the scenario can be pushed or challenged almost endlessly. Every time that a problem is solved it can be replaced with another. Alternatively, you can start to talk and ask questions from different perspectives and focus on other parts of the system.

Developing elegant and innovative solutions to the problems present can indicate that a candidate is the right fit for your software house. And, in most of the cases we’ve experienced, the candidate had no issue with the next step of the recruitment process: a coding task. However, when you’re looking for a senior software developer, a coding task is something that you simply cannot skip, so it’s vital that this skill is tested.

Where is the design?

True cost of software outsourcing - how can you meassure this?

Software development outsourcing is the term used when a technology company is hired to create and build a business’ IT systems. A hugely beneficial practise, outsourcing in this way can help small to mid-sized companies in particular not only gain a competitive edge, but significantly reduce costs and implementation time.

While the premise of software development outsourcing is quite simple and its benefits clear, finding a reputable company to deliver such services can be a challenge. Google ‘software development companies’ and the result is seemingly endless pages of vendors offering their services at competitive rates. So how do you know which of those developers will properly fulfill your needs and offer true value for money?

Knowing what to expect from a vendor, from both a service level and cost perspective is vital before choosing the best 

 for your business. There are a number of considerations that will help you identify a reputable software development company, all of which are detailed here, plus how much you should expect to pay for such services.

Software development outsourcing: What to consider

Outsourcing software development involves a significant level of trust from both parties to work successfully. More often than not, a business will have to share confidential and valuable data in order to get the IT systems it requires. Any reputable software development company will understand this and offer a service that not only meets a brief from technological perspective, but a human one too. To find a tech partner who will do just that, look out for vendors with the following attributes:

 – A reputable software development company will be sympathetic to their line of work being highly specialised, and will therefore help clients form requirements, ask difficult question and make sure all parties are completely clear on the business’ objectives

 – Making sure a software development company has the right skillset to fulfill technical requirements is vital, as any gaps in knowledge could lead to costly delays. A close look at a vendor's portfolio will give a good indication of whether the team possesses the correct skills, across the most relevant technology.

 – The more senior a team, the more business-orientated it is. A good way to gauge experience levels is to look at ‘Meet the team’ pages and see what percentage senior developers account for.

 – While a project might need multiple developers input, it’s a good idea to choose a vendor who will assign developers to one project at a time. Not only will the sense of ownership help increase a developer’s output, but means each project has one firm point-of-contact.

 – Any software development company worth it’s weight will help a client see past the ‘now’ with any technical requirements, and offer the expertise to scale a project up or down as needs and situations change.

 – Developers are in high demand globally, but that shouldn’t mean waiting long periods for projects to get off the ground. At Solidstudio, development can start in a matter of weeks, with the initial planning phase up and running in a matter of days.

 – A quality software development company will stay in regular contact with clients for a project’s entirety. At Solidstudio, weekly and biweekly calls are standard practise. Clients are also invited to join internal communication channels and are welcome to dial into daily standups if they so wish.

 – The last but one of the most important considerations of all. A quality software development company will be completely transparent at every stage of a project’s progression. From planning and implementation, to costs and potential issues, any work completed should be visible to the client, at any point. Be wary of talk of or signs of further outsourcing from within the vendor – this is also a major red flag.

Software development outsourcing: How much should it cost?

So now you know what to look for in an outsourcing software development company, the next big question is how much should it cost? Giving an exact figure here is almost impossible for two main reasons; firstly, because every project will have different requirements. And secondly, creating a digital product is a process of constant change, and therefore an estimate provided at initial contact stages could easily change (sometimes significantly) as the project evolves.

In order to get a realistic estimate, the best first step is to spend a good amount of time considering what your product requirements are and drawing it up into a project specification document. This should broadly outline how the required software should function, in both the short and long term, which will help vendors understand what level of work and seniority is required. It will also help avoid any misunderstandings in the development cycle and costly delays.

After sharing this document and an initial consultation with your chosen vendor before any work is carried out, you should expect an estimate based on an initial assessment of how much work is involved and the level of seniority it will require. Solidstudio has a track record of smaller end-to-end software development projects over a three-month period, as well as bigger, on-going projects and so can quickly offer very accurate initial estimates. These would include costs for:

It is worth reiterating costs can (and almost certainly will) change as a project evolves. Be wary of low estimates, cheaper estimates don’t necessarily offer the best value, and can often include hidden costs that soon add up. Reputable software development outsourcing companies will be completely transparent when it comes to costs, keeping clients abreast of any changes, and ensuring to check before undertaking new work that might add to the bill.

 is often best suited to IT outsourcing. This pricing method means fees are configured based on the amount of time spent on a project, combined with the cost of the effort (materials) used in the process. Solidstudio works to an hourly rate structure of $40-75, depending on the level of seniority required, with management overlay kept to a minimum.

For more information on software development outsourcing, or for an estimate, contact the Solidstudio team!

True cost of outsourcing - how can you meassure this? Read our article to find out.

Software development outsourcing: what to consider and how much does it cost?

How to deal with the troublesome business reality? Read this peace of content.

2020 became a huge game-changer in nearly every aspect of life, bringing new habits, practices, and relationships. The trust issues became even more important. We are heading to an end of the year that requires all of us to take the necessary steps to get through the crisis, face up to the challenges, redefine business goals and come to conclusions for the future. We have all experienced, to some extent, the aftermath caused by global lockdown - the economic slowdown, varied models in response to the crisis. 2020 was a year of testing, remodeling, and creating multiple scenarios. These challenging conditions affected the way people perceive and want to hold conversations with professionals, as well as match business partners. Here you can find some useful, universal information about the global changes in B2B that were dictated by the recent pandemic and how they may help redefine strategy for 2021. Some data and personal view for the passing year as well as tips for the year ahead.

 , the preferences and behaviors of B2B decision-makers have changed dramatically since the beginning of 2020. This applies to the way how business meetings were arranged, as well as to services provided by various participants. Global trends redefine how B2B sales models diversify affected by the pandemic. The survey applies to the new state of sales, and business management which might be helpful when designing new strategies, funnels, and creating partnerships. This is a good time for rethinking and implementing, for both current and future projects, because the design that takes into account the preferences of decision-makers will play a significant role in creating the company’s value and future profits.

 models are preferred by 70-80% of decision-makers. The advantages pointed out are travel savings, safety, and ease of scheduling a meeting. This approach applies either to ordering and reordering, as well as identifying and evaluating new suppliers.

 are as efficient or even more powerful than the prior models. In April 2020 65% of respondents declared that remote sales are as effective as face-to-face meetings (or even better performing). In August the number of respondents claiming the effectiveness of remote sales increased up to 75%. Additionally, 45% of respondents pointed out that remote sales were more effective.

 for remote sales or self-service does not only apply to the low-value purchase. 70% of B2B decision-makers declare the purchase of up to 500,000 USD via a self-service or remote interaction. 97% of the B2B clients consider a purchase in an end-to-end digital purchase model.

 Nearly 90% of the respondents declared that the new, remote sales models will stay for a longer time, and 60% declared to keep a certain limit in face-to-face meetings, even if the salesforce will be ready to meet in-person. Most companies point out additional sets to become successful, these are the ability to remote transition, basic video technology, new profiles of sales representatives, redesigned sales training. Over 80% of B2B companies declare to introduce more agile sales processes and focus on different sales methods, while nearly 60% plan to decrease the number of sales representatives, 70% plans to switch to a more dynamic resource model.

What are the forecasts for the economy of 2021?

After the global economic decline, the market is expected to bounce back. In the mid-2020 we faced a V-shaped recovery, that is noted, to drive to excel pre-pandemic GDP levels by the end of this year - setting the stage for strong post-recovery growth in 2021. The economists from 

 point out that now we are entering a new phase that is on track to deliver 6.4% GDP growth in the coming year. Several industries generally have been more affected by the effects of global lockdown, despite fears and uncertainties, global forecasts are more optimistic than they might seem.

Taking into account the changes that will remain with us, as well as the predictions for 2021, and the fact that we will never return 100% to pre-pandemic behavior and processes, it is worthwhile to redefine the core strategy. When looking for new opportunities, as well as setting new strategic goals, you should not reject the solutions given on the plate. Knowing that the expected growth, as well as digital relationships, will be fed by credibility, trust, and experience, these qualities will play an even more important role in building sustainable partnerships than before. Combining with excellent customer service, unique experiences, and discovering new paths will boost the global recovery, as well as will set businesses on a new road to success.

2020 proved that we create a system of connected vessels. When one broke, the next dependent parts started to leak. After a year of uncertainty, another optimistic view is that since we live in a mostly digitized world, where partnerships transcend political borders, the recovery is expected to happen even faster. Asynchronous recovery, on both, developed and emerging markets will accelerate in the same year. The exact speeding up is assumed around March or April when most of the geographies and sectors will join the revival.

Customer experience will play a central role

Promising forecasts are ahead, here are some thoughts which you can execute right now to be prepared for an upturn. Strengthen your partnerships and focus on making new ones. Setting a customer in a center of all your efforts, or in other words, having a focus on your customer’s needs and filling their expectations, will help you win 2021. Accelerated digital transformation will continue to grow, mapping, and designing improved customer journeys. According to the 

 , 87% of professionals say customer feedback became more important than it was before the pandemic. Businesses also gather feedback in new places, 60% of respondents claimed they’ve added new touchpoints.

A fast response will be crucial but must be followed in the right direction. Whether it is B2B or B2C, the rules are similar. Understanding the value you can provide, and what your customers expect from you will let your business make strategic changes quickly and confidently. That’s one principle that establishes agile businesses apart from the rest.

Face-to-face meetings won’t happen anytime soon, and even if, these will differ from what we have known. Digital experiences will play a dominant role. E-commerce and digital actions have become more important, keeping a close eye on the customer experience, setting new paths, and testing new digital channels will become the new winning strategy. The data that can be gathered and analyzed via digital channels will help improve decision making, shaping the future of your business, and prepare to better react when unexpected turbulences appear. Consider how the experience you’re delivering via the website or digital services could play a dominant role in the 2021 strategy.

Approach to recruiting talents for software house.

01 JANUARY 2018 • 10 MIN READ