ITS is a large IT company from Belarus. For more than ten years, the company has been engaged in software and cloud solutions development for the United States and European markets. Last year, ITS accepted an invitation from the Astana Hub Technopark representatives and learned the work conditions for IT companies in Kazakhstan. ITS Partner has officially become a member of the Astana Hub Technopark and opened its official representative office here. The company is now inviting local developers to join its team. We recorded an interview with co-founder and software development director Andrey Romanyuk and HR director Evgenia Ivanova, learned what development prospects for their company they discovered in Kazakhstan, and developers in what area and what level they are inviting to their team.
Andrey, tell us about the company. Who are ITS Partner on the market today?
The history of the company began more than 20 years ago. As ambitious young students, my friend Artem (one of the company’s founders) and I realized that we could create world-class software. Indeed, we made several successful projects, then worked in leading IT companies in Belarus, Germany, Austria, and the USA. We received the first large order at the end of 2006. As a result, we were able to open our first office, which was located on the second floor of a car wash. Here we had two small rooms where we put a table and chairs and hung up a board.
In 2012, Alexander Pashkovsky and Dmitry Yarmolich joined our team. Their experience made invaluable contributions to the company’s development and growth. There were only 15 of us at that time. Within four years, our team grew up to 50 people. We delivered large cloud projects together with Netgear in California.
Today we are 170 people. There are offices in Belarus, Ukraine, and now in Kazakhstan.
The team members are scattered around the world, which does not prevent us from building trusting relationships, both within the team and with our customers. We are building an island of Silicon Valley at ITS Partner. Our quality is highly regarded in Western Europe and the USA.
Talking about the company, I would like to point out three strengths that set us apart.
The first one: In the company, we do projects with a high technological level of processes and require a very high level of qualifications of each employee.
The second one is that we attach great significance to our internal corporate culture; we invest in and develop each employee’s career.
The third one is experience. We are ready to share the practices that we have developed during the years of working with our partners. We plan to share this at trainings and seminars, launch one-time or permanent learning programs together with our new partners in Kazakhstan. One of them is the Astana Hub international technology park for IT startups. On the basis of the technology park, we are opening the ITS Cloud Solutions R&D center. Now our teams are working on the content of trainings where everyone interested can acquire skills in the field of automated testing, DevOps, artificial intelligence (AI), information security, data analysis, work with high-load systems, and more. We would like to evaluate the guys from Kazakhstan, find out what they are more interested in and in which direction they would like to develop.
You mentioned that you pay great attention to corporate culture. Can you tell us more about this?
Andrey: Working within the world practices, we emphasize the development of corporate culture in the company, which is our strength. We get help from our team members: the company’s founders. Some founders live and work in California, and some in the United Kingdom. They actively help implement and adopt the best ideas and practices that they see in their countries because these regions are strong and developed enough to follow their example. I also worked for some time in a large corporation in California, which allowed me to see how internal communications can help improve work processes and the relationship between the employer and employees.
Our team members work from all over the world. These are India, Taiwan, Vietnam, USA, Canada, Spain, England, Sweden, Germany, Poland, and Ukraine. That is, we are used to the global work style. This is one of the reasons why we have come to Kazakhstan, and we believe that the local team will work as efficiently as we do.
Eugenie: We build relationships with employees in such a way that every person who came to ITS could work after in any large international company or in any company in Silicon Valley. Supporting women and young professionals in IT is especially important for us. Our values are peer education, mentoring, and mutual support.
So you practiced remote work before the pandemic?
Andrey: Yes, we worked like this even before the pandemic, this results from the specifics of our projects. We started working remotely about 10-11 years ago with our first teams. Since then, we have learned to hold online meetings, agree among ourselves via various chats, emails, have actively worked on tools with which we could do this work better, despite the fact that we cannot be together. In the team, each developer takes on a little more responsibility for their part of the work and tries to bring it to its logical completion, and then passes it on to the next team member. This is an end-to-end concept.
What attracted you to Kazakhstan? Actually, you offer work, but you are not looking for clients here.
Andrey: We raised this point in our team. I can say that in Belarus, we have little information about what is happening in Kazakhstan. We had no idea about the country and its capaсities, neither did our founders and partners. It was difficult to make a decision considering a lack of information. Magzhan Madiev, CEO of Astana Hub Technopark, invited us to see Kazakhstan and learn the possibilities of work for IT companies. As a result, at one of the meetings of founding members, we decided to accept this invitation. Alexander Pashkovsky (CEO) and Dmitry Yarmolich (CDO) came here first. My colleagues were positively surprised by several facts. There is a high level of infrastructure and the international system of law – English law. We saw that we could legally register a company and work transparently remotely. And, of course, we saw the serious capabilities of Kazakhstan’s youth. There is a generally high level of technical qualifications of young specialists. Also, we are happy with the knowledge of the English language, which significantly helps integrate into all our projects quicker. This is it. We realized that we could expand cooperation in Kazakhstan.
An office in Kazakhstan is for us an entry into a new country and an expansion of our international presence. We invite Kazakh specialists to work on international projects, first of all, on projects with customers mostly from the USA and Europe. Accordingly, we see ourselves as a guide to the world-class development standard.
Eugenie: We feel welcome in Kazakhstan: in the friendliness of local people, the conditions created for the development of the IT business, and the interest to us from the developers. Our partners have significant demands in terms of the quantity and quality of software and hardware developers, and we cannot always satisfy them quickly. We hope that we will be able to find what we are looking for in Kazakhstan. There are specialists here, and we can improve the technical part, train, and pass our knowledge. We also feel cultural similarity due to our inclusion in the Russian-speaking area: we read similar books, watch the same films, which greatly facilitates communication, and we have similar values. If you are going to develop your company, Kazakhstan is quite a logical step.
What will a developer get?
Andrey: This is work with high-tech world-scale projects, in which hundreds of exciting issues are solved every day at the cutting edge of technology. This is the development of the technologies themselves, creating new ways of processing, storing, and transferring data, working with security, and balancing complexity and functionality.
Second, in addition to the technologies themselves, the developer will have the opportunity to communicate directly with distributed teams. Communication is equal enough. To the extent of their diving into the project, everyone has the opportunity to launch initiatives and implement innovations.
The third one is the efficiency of the internal processes by which we work. An effective project where the developer will see how their contribution quickly turns into a result millions of users will use.
Eugenie: On top of that, developers get the opportunity to travel between our offices. Our new team member, the office director in Kazakhstan, Moldirzhan Bazarova, can tell about her recent trip to Minsk. Thus our employees gain a specific cultural work experience.
We have a specific homely atmosphere in the company. We do not get stuck in the bureaucracy, and the guys can always come, talk, and solve their problems. No one kicks anyone off. The developers in Kazakhstan will have all the perks that our developers in Belarus and Ukraine have. We are currently developing a package, and we understand that the most important and valuable resource of a company is people.
Andrey: I would also like to highlight the basics we have. This is a high standard of workplace organization, an office in the new Astana Hub pavilion, and our modern and powerful equipment. What is no less important is that we work only officially. We always formalize all employment relations, pay for vacations and sick leave, and have protection against currency movements.
Any of our employees has access to all benefits and opportunities that all company employees have. We do not have any restrictions here, and we are trying very hard to monitor this.
Eugenie: We have a huge credit of trust in our employees, of course, it is not endless. First, we look at what can be corrected from the outside and at factors that can disturb our employees.
In what area are you lookig for developers?
Eugenie: We are mainly looking for specialists in Java, DevOps, C development of Android, IOS, AI, and Python stacks. We would like to note that our guys are working on products, but we do not consider ourselves a product company. Firstly, we do not have a small factory making products, and secondly, we are not interested in marketing and advertising. However, it is worth noting that we work by a product company model, and sometimes we work as a development center for a particular partner. It is essential to understand the difference.
Tell us about the requirements for developers.
Eugenie: Development experience in some projects over 3 years, in some over 5 years, depending on the project’s needs. Even if your work experience is less than that, but you have already achieved a lot, we are waiting for you. Requirements for candidates for vacant positions are available here. Even if a person performs unsure in a short pre-screening, there is no need to worry: There is an extensive interview ahead. In addition, our specialists will always give a tip on where candidates have gaps and where they need to pull up their competencies. We never close the door on candidates who have not met the requirements; they can return to us after a while. We have few vacancies for novice junior specialists, but we plan to invite them to work when we have a strong development team in Kazakhstan.
Eugenie: Another advantage and obstacle is a reasonably high threshold for entering the company, it is not so easy to join us. On the one hand, we have relatively high standards. On the other hand, we are ready to take people who are still not up to standard but are ready for active development and growth. We do not look at such formal things as “how many years of experience” or “what university one graduated from”. We look at how a person thinks, their motivation, work ethics, and other things.
One of our youngest employees joined the company at the age of 17. He was hired because he thought well and showed promising results in the interview. By that time, he had no higher education or experience, therefore getting into the company was a huge advantage for his further professional development. On the one hand, there are interesting, motivated colleagues around. On the other hand, there is a company ready to support you in every possible way and help you grow. We spend most of our time at work; therefore, it must be comfortable here.
In our company, soft skills are equated to hard skills. When specialists with a high technical level come to us, but we see that a person is toxic or unable to communicate, we may refuse them, even if we need such a specialist very much. Hard skills can be ramped up, one can learn much.
How many selection stages does a candidate need to pass?
It depends on our partners. As a rule, there is a short interview with the candidate first. The candidate talks about the projects they did and answers questions. We can ask additional questions, which are not obvious from the resume.
Then there is a short pre-screening: if we are not sure, but we want to give a candidate a chance, we conduct a half-hour interview with them. After that, there is a profound technical interview. The process of employment with us usually takes about a week. If necessary, candidates are interviewed by our partners.
Candidates can choose a project. As a rule, we hire to several commands; for example, we have an extensive hiring stream in Java. First, we look at the CV. If a candidate suits everywhere, we tell them we have three projects, and the developer chooses the one that suits them most. Or, if they are interested in two of three projects, they are interviewed for two projects at once. Therefore, when developers join a project, they understand what they will do there. In our vacancy announcements, we describe what the specialist will do in detail. We respect the time of our candidates and our time. Therefore, we provide as much information, communication, and transparency as possible. It takes two to tango.
Eugenie, are there women developers in the company?
ITS Partner currently employs more than 170 people. Of these, about 25% are girls, which is a small percentage of course, given that most women work in the back office. However, there are teams with more women developers than men. First of all, we are looking for good specialists to join the team, and we will not refuse a person because of gender. Obviously, there are more men in the IT industry. We have set ourselves the bar of 45% women in the company. We think ambitiously.
Andrey: But I can say that we are ahead of our American partners. When they visit us, they are pleasantly surprised at seeing that there are girls in each team. We treat all our employees equally, even by American standards: we are taking these steps more actively.
You have managed to build a strong and promising IT company. What advice would you give to business people and startups?
My friends and I, who later became the founders of ITS Partner, just like everyone else, studied at school and then at the university. We believed that the knowledge we received would lead us to success. We also realized that we needed to continue studying even after graduation. And so it happened. We started to work and continued to gain our knowledge, and at one point, we managed to create our own business. Then we redoubled our efforts. Twenty years have passed since graduation from the university, but we haven’t stopped studying. Our knowledge helped us build a large IT company and find strong partners in the USA and Europe.
ITS’s development is a story of learning, the desire to develop, improve, and never stop. We started with 2-3 people, now there are more than 170 of us, and there are international offices around the world.
Are you looking only for developers in Kazakhstan? Are you not looking for clients?
Finding new customers is not a priority for us, and there are no problems with finding a partner. We have a shortage of human resources. In Kazakhstan, we have two main goals: discovering talents and creating opportunities for their development.
We are working to ensure that the team in Kazakhstan becomes as effective and dynamic as other teams in our company, and has the opportunity to work with us all over the world. We know how to build a Silicon Valley island in every ITS Partner office. We make global development standards available to our employees. At ITS Partner, you are a part of a global team where you as equals create advanced products together with colleagues from the USA, Europe, and Asia.
Source: bluescreen.kz