How startups are finding and retaining best coders

By Amrita Premrajan, TimesJobs.com


Though there are tons of talented developers in India, it is tough for startups to lure the best, hire them and keep them engaged. In a business landscape where large tech companies are honing their advantages recognising that startups do have the potential to give them a challenge is making it tougher for the new ventures.

In such times, to create a dent in the market, one thing startups are doing is investing in finding the best tech talent, especially developers, to build their solutions ground-up.

To do this, HR heads of tech startups are experimenting. For example, Asha Poluru, chief - people experience, Altimetrik, has given a fresh and aspirational positioning to the much used ' coder' designation.

Elaborating on this, she said: "Attracting the right people is one of the biggest challenges faced by all IT companies today. Therefore, we have adopted different types of innovative user interface competitions to attract talented people. We believe that if the vision of the company is attractive, then there is a desire to be a part of that firm. Here at Altimetrik, everyone is a 'Design Engineer' and not a coder/programmer. This has transformed the way we provide customer experiences - with empathy and intuitiveness. It has also helped us attract some of the best people in the industry."

On the other hand, Sachidanand Kulkarni, VP-HR and Culture, Webonise Labs, leverages coding contests as a tool to engage coders in the house.

"At Webonise, we organise Geek Hours which are 24-hour continuous coding hackathons. Come with your idea and develop it right from concept to product. Such contests and initiatives help build learning culture in the organisation and also uplift talent profile of people and stay competitive," he said.

In fact, an interesting trend is that many startups are taking active interest in facilitating their programmers to participate in national-level coding contests, which are now emerging as the so-called 'IPL for programmers.'

For instance, in the recently concluded TechGig Code Gladiators 2015, we met Swapnil Shirsath, a passionate coder from Practo, and one of the finalists. "This not only gives a great platform for talented coders to prove themselves purely based on their merit but also engages him/her with the company at a much deeper level than what standard employee engagement activities in the enterprise lead to," he said.

"Added to this, such coding contests also act as a platform of discovering the best brains in the industry. This inturn helps the startups in not only benchmarking their talent against the best in the industry, but also to find out whom they may want to hire in the near future," he said.

We checked with Webonise's Sachidanand on what he would evaluate if he is on a coding battleground like this evaluating coders. He gave four key points:

1) For a problem solver/coder, it is essential to know the fundamentals better and develop the ability to adapt to new technologies.

2) If one is good at basics such as C, C++, OOPS, Data Structures, Database and deep understanding of how software development happens, then it is easy for him/her to adapt to new technologies and grow well.

3) Since technology is fast evolving, developers should be well versed with some of the new emerging technologies and domains are, Ruby, SCALA, CLOSURE, Angular DB, Angular JS, Mobile technologies, Drones, GIS, IOT, 3D printing, Social computing, Big data, pervasive robotics etc.

4) Clarity of the thought process, curiosity to learn and grow, communication skills and most important, passion for technology/problem solving