Forem: Client Server Technology Recruitment

How can I plan interviews around a strict work schedule?

Client Server Technology Recruitment — Thu, 05 Sep 2019 11:07:16 +0000

Question: I am currently working as a software developer and I am thinking about leaving my current job - but getting time off to interview is proving difficult. My current employer is really strict about time. I can't book leave less than a month in advance, and sick days must be accounted for. What can I do?

Answer: Businesses are practical and understand the constraints on people's time. You'll find many are willing to interview candidates outside 9-5. Skype and video interviews are also popular, offering more flexibility to candidates.

The key thing is to be upfront with your recruiter about your availability and what you can and can't do. They're the middle-person between you and the employer. They'll ensure practicalities like interview times are agreed upon ahead of time. Keep them in the loop.

Agree? Disagree? We would love to know your thoughts.

Has anyone used Nameko microservices?

Client Server Technology Recruitment — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 09:12:56 +0000

Interesting interview with one of Nameko's co-authors Matt Yule-Bennett on our blog this morning.

Nameko is growing in popularity, with close to 60,000 downloads every month.

Has anyone used Nameko? How have you found it?

Do introverts make better engineers?

Client Server Technology Recruitment — Mon, 19 Aug 2019 11:27:41 +0000

In the latest edition of our series The Story, we talked with Dr Thomas French who is the CTO at data science company Sandtable in London.

We asked Thomas about Sandtable's company culture, and he had a really interesting response:

"We are a company dominated by introverts. We're quite a deliberative and academic crowd, but also collaborative. It's been an ongoing process figuring out how best to collaborate given different types of personalities."

In the world of data science, it's important to be detailed-orientated, but does that favour introverts over extroverts?

You can read the full interview with Dr French by clicking here

How can I prepare for getting hit by a bus?

Client Server Technology Recruitment — Thu, 15 Aug 2019 10:40:29 +0000

Question: I'm a member of a small team - and by small, I mean there are three of us. I'm often the only engineer working on technical aspects of our projects.

This actually happens more times than I want to admit. Sometimes, I'm the sole-coder, sometimes I'm analysing or compiling technical information, sometimes I'm preparing technical data and presentations.

When you work on cross-functional teams, it's hard to keep the rest informed about the details of what you are doing.

But what if I get 'hit by a bus'? How should I work in a team where I'm the only technical contributor to avoid problems from a sudden departure?

You can read our answer on our blog, but what do you think?

Has anyone moved from London to another part of the UK for a tech job?

Client Server Technology Recruitment — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 14:09:19 +0000

Our Director Nick Boulton has written as blog post explaining why the tech market outside London is booming.

Has anyone moved from London to another part of the UK to take up a tech job? What are your experiences with the tech scene outside of the capital?

Will Java be as widely used in five years?

Client Server Technology Recruitment — Mon, 12 Aug 2019 09:34:03 +0000

Interesting interview on our blog with three senior engineers about the future of Java. Interesting points made about cold start ups, hopes for new releases, and the biggie - whether Java will be as widely used in the next five years.

What does everyone think?

3 things CTOs must consider when hiring

Client Server Technology Recruitment — Wed, 07 Aug 2019 08:13:10 +0000

By Nick Bolton, Client Server Director

As technology disrupts every market, it’s unsurprising the war for developer talent is at fever pitch. Whatever your technology needs, from start-up to Blue-chip, engineers are the hottest commodity on the market.

Virtually every tech leader I speak to thinks a lack of tech talent is holding back their organisation’s growth. But with the tight labour market and widening skills gap, finding, hiring and retaining top talent has never been more challenging.

There are a three fundamental things hiring managers - but in particular CTOs - should keep in mind when finding top tech talent.

1) Look for hobbits, not wizards

If you want to build a world-class development team, you need more than one superstar. The best software isn't built by one person; it's built by a team. Don’t spend all your time and resources searching for Gandalf when what you really need is a team of hobbits.

Your ideal tech team will be made up of individuals whose skillsets work together. The best way to do this is to think less about what the work is and more about how it can be delivered. This shifts your thinking towards scoping out a team than finding one person to rule it all.

2) Look for people who are both kinds of ‘smart’

This is about more than book smarts – it’s about people smarts too. The job of an engineer is to understand complex concepts and then communicate them clearly to everyone, not just techies.

The best engineers can both develop incredibly efficient algorithms in record time AND work with teams across the organisation to achieve the big picture.

3) Look for detail and more detail

When it comes time to talk about your tech stack, the best advice is to go deep.

Asking low-level questions about syntax, design patterns and general technology are aimed at finding relevant experience, but they are not the way to identify the best people for your business. The biggest mistake CTOs make when interviewing is over-valuing present skills and under-valuing future growth, skills and anticipating technology and market changes.

You should talk about the technology a candidate has used and the tech stack they’ll be working with. Go into more detail about the problems and issues they have dealt with and how they found a solution.

Don’t just pander to what they know or ask questions so narrow that you only ask about your tech stack. You will end up hiring people for what they already know.

The pool of people who do exactly what you need them to do is so much smaller than the pool of people who are smart enough to be good at that job and improve over time.

Three quick-fire questions to ask before making someone an offer

If you can answer these three questions with a resounding “Yes!” after interviewing potential employees, hire them fast!

1: Do they want to do this job? Now and in the future, something you need to establish by painting a vison of what the future looks like.

2: Can they do this job? This is not the same as “Can they do this job right now?” but you need to be confident they can learn how to do the job.

3: Are they going to get better at this job? Smarts!

Nick Bolton is a Director at Client Server Technology Recruitment. At Client Server, we are driven by technology but powered by people. We find exceptional individuals for exceptional organisations in London, the UK, Australia, Europe and the US. Visit the Client Server website to start the conversation

Meet the tech team who finds scrum too slow

Client Server Technology Recruitment — Tue, 23 Jul 2019 14:59:35 +0000

If you pressed them for job titles, Joe Horsnell and Harry Lascelles would call themselves tech leads. But they tell Client Server’s Michael Oliver why hierarchy isn’t as important as passion and curiosity.

Michael Oliver: Not everybody would have heard of Bamboo Loans – tell me about yourselves?

Harry Lascelles: We are a fintech company specialising in consumer finance.

Joe Horsnell: Bamboo was initially a guarantor loans company and that's still part of our business, but by volume, we focus more on unsecured lending now.

MO: You have something of a flat team structure – how would you describe your jobs?

HL: Titles aren't something that we lean on much here. Depending on the temperature, I've called myself principal software developer, lead engineer, tech lead, all these kinds of things. I use tech lead most often.

JH: We're an interesting team because Harry and I both came from working at UBS, where it's very corporate and regimented, but we're very flat structured here. We're all part of the team, but it's not like people report to Harry and me.

MO: How did you get into software development? Were you the kind of kids who messed around with Q-Basic and the like?

HL: My dad first showed me programming when I was about four years old, so going way back. IT has just always been in my blood. He was a journalist for the FT, so he also taught me about financial products and services. Finding something where I could bring them together was a real bonus.

JH: I just was interested in computers from a very young age. My dad got a VIC-20 in the early '80s. My first job was at Logica, for a few years, then my first move was to UBS, where I met Harry. I was at UBS for over a decade, doing the things that you need to do to progress your career, so doing less and less the things that I liked doing, like building software and using computers, and more and more management, building and running teams. Then this opportunity came up to go and work at a start-up, so from UBS with tens of thousands of employees, and departments within departments, to a four-person start-up. A bit of a change.

MO: How did you find that transition?

JH: Personally, I'd just become very tired of the big corporate environment. It just felt like we weren’t achieving anything.

HL: For example, if you wanted to create a database, you had to fill out forms in triplicate. In any big organisation, spinning up test infrastructure, or even production structure, can take quite a while. Moving to a start-up, a small company, has been such an eye opener. To any of your readers, I would strongly recommend it. I didn't consider it when I was taking on my first job, but it's something I should have done.

MO: What made that possible?

HL: From day one, we had a CTO in Rob Harrop - one of the authors of the Java Spring Framework – who had made great initial IT choices. Straight out of the gate, we were on the cloud and AWS. I can’t imagine doing a start-up 20 years ago without cloud, it has been a complete game changer.

Find out how fast Bamboo Loans plans to deploy their releases by reading the full interview on our blog

Three software testing tips you need in 2019

Client Server Technology Recruitment — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 08:23:00 +0000

Marie Cruz and Samer Naqvi are QA & Continuous Delivery Consultants at ECS Digital, with almost 20 years of QA experience between them. They spoke at June’s Women of Silicon Roundabout in London about tips to make the lives of software testing engineers easier. Here are three big takeaways from their session:

Tip 1: Software testing must be both fast and good

Samer Naqvi:

As software becomes key in creating competitive advantages across all markets, companies now do not have the luxury of choosing either speed or quality when developing software. Agile process has matured quite a lot and DevOps has now entered this environment as well. Continuous deployment, continuous integration, and continuous testing are actually the key in enabling quality at speed.
And out of all of these, continuous testing is by far the most challenging out of them. They're primarily a tools-based activity and continuous deployment is a team and tool base activity. Continuous testing requires not only tools and teams, it also requires individuals and services. If continuous testing is done correctly, it is actually the masterpiece in the agile developing processes.

Tip 2: Consider Shift Left vs Shift Right

Marie Cruz:

Shift left is about testing as early as possible. There's a lot of surveys that suggests that the later you find bugs, the more expensive and time-consuming it is to fix them. Just imagine if there's a live bug. How much of your time would be dedicated in trying to fix this bug? The idea with shift left testing is to prevent bugs as early as possible. We want to shorten our test cycles so that we can deliver faster. This is obviously nothing new, but then I would see that this trend would keep on happening this year and many more years to come especially because the business expectations keep on changing.

Shift right is testing on production, and that might sound scary. Why would you do light testing on production? What's the purpose of this test environments anyway? The purpose of shift right testing is because we know for a fact that in life there's unprecedented scenarios that could happen. There are a lot of techniques nowadays that companies are using, like A/B testing or Canary releases. So with A/B testing, we're actually delivering two versions of a feature of our application based on what the customer sees. Customer A would look at variant A, Customer B would look at variant B. We collect metrics based on the performance on which design performed better. The analytics team, would then collect this data and feed this back with the development team. The advantage of this is we're developing something that the customers would actually want.

Tip 3: Contract Testing is Getting Better

Samer Naqvi:

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, we used to test web applications that were on monolithic application. It was such a great time only dealing with one database and one depository – it made monitoring very easy. But monolithic applications kind of fizzled out when traffic and dependencies increased. Applications then started with lots of microservices lots of dependencies and testing them became much more troublesome. We tried using mock testing, but it was often unreliable. Then we move to using fly dependencies but that was very costly and difficult to maintain. Nowadays, we use contract testing.

In contract testing, we have both the consumer and the provider. The consumer is the service that requires the data from the other service. The provider is the service that is giving that information. That information is kept on in a contract which is kept on a broker, which can be a kind of filing system.

If you are both the consumer and the provider on the same file repository, you can keep them on file or on Cloud, Google Cloud etc. But another option is to put it on Docker containers, which is now really popular.

Client Server is the leading technology recruitment consultancy. We are driven by technology, but powered by people. With more than 300 live tech jobs in the UK and Europe, visit our website to start the conversation

Interview with Phil Parsonage, the Chief Engineering Officer at Foundry

Client Server Technology Recruitment — Wed, 26 Jun 2019 09:15:08 +0000

Phil Parsonage is the Chief Engineering Officer at Foundry, who have been developing creative software for the digital design, media and entertainment industries for more than 20 years. Their clients include major feature film studios and post-production houses such as Pixar, ILM, MPC, Walt Disney Animation, Weta Digital, DNEG, and Framestore.

Phil tells Client Server Marketing Manager Michael Oliver about what Foundry looks for when hiring engineers and how a little bit of C++ can make a huge difference on the big screen.

Michael Oliver: You’ve been with Foundry for more than 15 years – can you tell me about your current role?

Phil Parsonage: I'm chief engineering officer and have been in a variety of jobs, through starting off as a C++ developer, then running different departments and through to my current role where I look after product engineering across the media and entertainment part of the business, plus some of our internal technology teams.

MO: What does Foundry do?

PP: Foundry is a creative software developer for anything that involves pixels and beautiful pictures and products. Our company’s brand platform is “Imagination engineered” which is all about advancing the art of technology and enabling more and better creativity, faster. And our mission is to help customers meet the demands of their markets by helping them bring incredible ideas to life, faster and better. We work across two main industries - media and entertainment - where we do a lot of work in both post-production and pre-production in visual effects, animation, gaming etc. And the second one is in digital design, where we help our customers visualise photo-realistic designs efficiently using digital tools.

MO: Foundry software is a mainstay of the film industry, isn’t it?

PP: At a basic level, one of our products - Nuke - manipulates pixels to form the images used in the films and tv shows that we all know and love. It’s used pretty widely!

MO: Do you ever get to see what your work looks like on the big screen?

PP: No, funnily enough. If we can tell that our tools have been used in a film, we've probably not made the tool as well as we’d like to. I love going to see our customers, that's probably the highlight for me. We're really lucky - they’re some of the biggest VFX houses in the world and seeing what they're doing, and hearing about what they're working on, and being able to work with those guys is a privilege. Being able to tell your daughter that you went to see the people that make Star Wars is a nice feeling.

To read the full interview, Click here