Pavel joined the company 7 years ago, having at that time only two years of development experience. According to Pavel, he worked on various company projects, but later took the initiative and started developing a new field: work on a platform for IPTV streaming. Now the project team has more than 30 developers, and the total number of IPTV users has exceeded 20 million. We asked Pavel about his career path, the products they develop with the team, and what requirements they have for new team members.
Pavel Sirotkin:
“Taking a proactive role in work is the key feature.”
How it all started
Before ITS Partner, I changed two companies. The first one was very small, and I quickly grew out of it, and as for the second one, on the contrary, I did not want to “grow in.” I was looking for a happy medium: a company with experienced people and effective practices, while actively developing. ITS Partner was just that. At that time, I had only a little more than two years of Java development experience. Therefore, I spent a lot of my free time on my technical development: I studied new technologies, read books, visited meetups and conferences, and listened to podcasts. I didn’t do it for my career, rather I just followed my interests, and as a technician, I demanded a lot from myself and others.
After about 4–5 years of work experience, I came to the point where I began to understand how projects should be done. It was an important milestone when my personal basis was formed and brick by brick, I started building the subsequent work. I realized then that among thousands of different projects it is possible and necessary to single out common patterns and mistakes, something those projects “rhyme” with. There is a certain thrill in gaining knowledge that you can apply the next time.
Looking back, I think that I greatly benefited from being proactive. I was not indifferent to what was going on around me. I started developing new projects in the company, teaching my colleagues, and helping them. This is very valuable to me, both in the work environment and elsewhere. It is important to understand that proactiveness does not appear out of a clear sky, you need to work with it, create a demand, motivate or, on the contrary, get out of the way.
This is how I became first a team lead, and then the head of the department. In our company, new work directions are constantly opening, new teams are created, and there is good vertical growth. There are not many steps yet, but their number is increasing over time.
About IPTV project
33 people are working on this project. IPTV is the streaming of television over the Internet, everything that users watch on TV, tablets, or smartphones. One of the project’s broadest directions is targeted advertising when relevant content is shown to users during commercial breaks. This is based on the analysis of many factors: consumer profile, system settings, which channels the user watches, and which ones he skips. There are many interesting technical problems connected to heavy loads and big data.
The main part of the development falls on the server side: cloud distributed systems. They are often under high load and tens of thousands of requests are coming to them every second. We devote plenty of time to this subject during interviews, usually, candidates have little experience with such tasks. Our project teams should be multifunctional: there are high-load services, the classic front-end, work with big data in the cloud, and DevOps is indispensable.
We are doing the project itself for American providers. At present, IPTV has more than 20 million users. The number of platform users is growing, so is the functionality. We are constantly adapting to new conditions and looking for the best solutions.
About new solutions for the product
Our team is very little involved in product management and solutions, everything is mostly on our partners’ side. Nevertheless, the team’s initiatives are periodically converted into product ideas, which then go into production.
Our developers focus mainly on technical problems, and business analysts and product managers focus on the needs of the product and business. It is especially important that they work together, with good feedback. It’s like DevOps culture: developers and operations team up, and developers and product team up similarly.
About the new project
Presently, our team has started work on a new security project. We make video surveillance solutions for small businesses from Europe. This is a large enough platform that organizes all the necessary communication for security systems. As a result, business owners and security services will be able to recognize the moment of theft or property damage. We do the project as distributed scrum teams.
About the team
We have great teams in the company, and we are constantly taking steps to become even better.
We are among the first ones in Belarus who started using the Kotlin development language, which was developed in Russia, in St. Petersburg. This is a great language, it has become the main language for Android development, and if you look even at backend vacancies, many of them require Kotlin knowledge. It happened so that we made the right decision, and all the developers in my backend team know Kotlin and write in it.
Around the same time, we moved to AWS and put a lot of time and effort into using serverless solutions in this cloud, which I think is really cool.
I could talk about the team for a long time, but what I would really like to mention is honesty. We are making a good product and we have many technical and organizational challenges. At the same time, we have space to grow and change for the better. Let us speak openly about what is good and what is not that good, only with such an approach you can expect the same honesty in return.
Training
I truly believe that competence development and enhancement should be one of the basic values for every person and company towards its employees. I think that’s exactly what we have here. This must be approached systematically. In the first place, there must be a request for competence development, for example, from a company, but it is better when it is an employee’s personal request.
ITS Partner provides different types of training support. There is training within the company when our experienced colleagues and team leads share their knowledge. Recently there were “How not to do modern DevOps,” “Why and how to do One-to-One,” and others. We provide access to Udemy and Coursera online courses and undertake training on Amazon and Scrum certifications.
We pay considerable attention to managers’ development within the company. Over the past year and a half, the number of ITS Partner employees has doubled and now we are more than 200. This brings certain challenges because the old management model does not always work well enough. To give you a picture, when I joined the company in 2014, mainly everyone met in the office, nobody took remote work seriously, teams and departments were 5 people each. But everything has changed dramatically. Now we are working in several countries, the number of people has grown 5 times. Therefore, it is very important to respond quickly to new circumstances and this has required a lot of changes.
Personal selections for training
I’d add a few recommendations, including the latest ones, on where and how I get information and additional training. In JUG Ru Group, there are cool conferences around IT, they post videos on YouTube. I highly recommend the DevZen podcast, a Scrum course from Konstantin Razumovsky. Aleksey Minkevich School of Management — I just recently have taken a course in project management, this is a high-level school.
I recommend you make the most of social networks, subscribe to interesting channels and people. Study the experience of your colleagues in the industry, it will definitely pay off.
Pavel, can people without experience get into development?
Yes, of course! We have quite a lot of such employees. Most of them came after training courses, from fields completely unrelated to IT, and didn’t have technical education. We train them during their internship, after which they go to real projects and perform quite well within the period from six months to one year.
More and more people from other fields will come to the industry. The IT services market is growing, the pandemic has accelerated digitalization, and right now, there is a huge pent-up demand: there are not enough developers. On the other hand, people understand that the IT industry is flexible, with good opportunities for financial and personal growth.
In the company, we invest heavily in newcomers and beyond. Each new engineer or manager brings his or her own experience, knowledge, ways of solving problems, which is extremely important for the development of the company and its teams.
What are the technical requirements for your candidates?
I would highlight the general technical level and intellectual curiosity: at the interviews, some people really lack criticism of what they see and the ability to ask “why” and “what for.” If you’ve got a task, it’s worth asking “why is it this way?,” because you may misunderstand it and therefore do something you were not supposed to do. This is not an IT-related skill; therefore, it will be useful everywhere.
As you have already understood, it is important for us that our future colleague is willing and is able to learn and develop. The background is also important, for example, in programming, it helps to learn frameworks, additional languages, and see the mentioned “rhymes.”
English is also important, all our projects are with Europe and the USA.
I would say that our hiring is quite flexible, we set high technical requirements for people, but when we see potential, an investment in the future, we will make concessions. In my experience, such investments were a success in 80 % of cases. By the way, about the company’s growth: the guy who came to us as an intern is now a team lead. For a little bit more than 4 years, he has remarkably grown both personally and technically, he is very proactive. I have at least three similar examples.
About offices in Kazakhstan
Now we are working on building a strong and solid team in Kazakhstan, based on the principles in which we believe ourselves. Two developers from Kazakhstan are already working in my teams. I think there will be more of them. We have an office in Nur-Sultan in the Astana Hub IT startups technology park. And in September, we opened an office in Almaty in the Fifty Four business space. Therefore, now we very often visit Kazakhstan, hold meetups, and participate in educational events. We are planning to visit the Digital Bridge technology forum soon. I will share my experience in project development with the USA and Europe. Join us, it will be interesting.
Source: bluescreen.kz