Is it easy to find talented developers in your country?

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It seems that universities in Brno are not able to produce enough developers to feed hungry IT companies in Czech “Silicon Valley”. Actually, I was thinking about using “Silicon Dragon“ instead because of the Legend of the Brno Dragon. What do you think are the best sources of talented and motivated people that are open to go the extra mile?
I think that the most common factor that inhibits software companies’ growth is the ability to find enough skilled employees. Maybe it is true only for our region, or do you see it the same? I realized the crisis on our labor market approximately a year ago. Those times, it took us almost seven months to hire just one developer. We were thinking if we should lower the criteria, find another source of potential employees, attract them in a new unusual way or concentrate on scaling up productivity of our current developers. The question that led us to the solution was: “Which of our employees are the most valuable ones, what are their qualities and how did we get them?” I recommend you to ask such a question each time you are struggling to find the right employees.

Nowadays, we are trying to attract talented graduates or university students that have a passionate interest in IT, especially in being an amazing developer. We are presenting Kentico as a possible employer at universities, we are open to collaborate on diploma theses and two of our developers are teaching at a university so they are also working as a kind of scoutsJ. Last but not least, our Summer of Code program started two months ago. Over seventy people sent us a CV, almost thirty of them made a sample application, ten of them were invited to an interview and finally, four skilled developers joined our team. Look forward to a Chat module, Banner management and other cool stuff that they developed over the summer :-)

I wish that in a few years, there would be a huge queue of people trying to get employed only because it is the Kentico. :-)
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Antonin Moravec

Hi, I'm the Project Manager at Kentico. My main interests are project management - especially the Agile one and Soft Skills. I’m looking forward to discuss a wide range of topics related to our projects.

Comments

Kentico_Anthony Moravec commented on

I think that most employees would say that they deserve a little bit higher salary, no matter how high their current salaries are. If salaries on the market aren’t extremely higher than yours, people would most probably leave because of new challenge, current boss, work conditions, better product and other reasons.

M. Rutter commented on

"M. Rutter, you think that salaries are in IT generally too low or too high?"

Good question, my friend! Probably it's not the case everywhere (I hope) but in my personal experience often has happened that after a period of internal training, the employee changes job for a better economic offer. Investing in staff to be trained, not always paid (unfortunately). I was also curious to know how the salary is in other European countries. In our area, ranging from a minimum of 1.200/1.300 euros/month to 2,500/2,800 euros/month for a senjor developer (net value - you have to add taxes for about 47%/50% - based on the national contract you belong to, in Italy an employee is paid for 13 or 14 months).

Marcello

kentico_antoninm commented on

Hi all,

Thank you for your comments. Sure, we are not startup with temporary workers and our team consists of highly skilled people. The thing is that many of us started our carrier @Kentico already as students and grew as fast as Kentico did. For example I began as a tester four years ago, Petr Passinger as a support engineer and I can continue to our current technical leaders and further. I thing that the best way how to grow our team in long term is to employ talented students now, train them continuously, give them chance to be involved in real-world projects and in few years we’ll get young, loyal, graduates with praxis. Yes, it is long way to go, but it will surely pay - especially if we see it nowadays as a worldwide problem.
M. Rutter, you think that salaries are in IT generally too low or too high?

M. Rutter commented on

Dear Anthony, as Delton has written I think it's a worldwide problem. Think about the fact that italian University often teach C/C++ and Java and the students are not involved in real-world applications until the staging period, at the end of their studies! But let me introduce another problem I would like to deepen: what about the salary? How much does Kentico pays for a junoir and a senior developer? This is another problem I can see with developers recruitment.

Delton Phillips commented on

Anthony it's the same everywhere it seems. My company has been trying to hire developers for the last 2 years, it has been hard going and the graduate stream is pretty slow. We've tried to do some of the approaches you are using and reaps some success. Surprised this is a worldwide problem. I figure for Kentico doesn't like the outsourcing idea either

Armysniper89 commented on

I hope that Kentico also looks to hire more established developers as well as college students. I would LOVE to work for Kentico! :)