Case «Scientific approach»

TO FIND A HARDCORE JAVA DEV

Our partner is a social network with a focus on family ties. The company helps people to investigate their origins, find relatives, and build a family tree.

Our client has very mature specialists on the team. There are almost no middle or junior developers. All the key employees are skilled in their own fields and related ones. Each of them has vast authority and freedom of action. However, with great power comes great responsibility, and the ones implementing the project are always the one responsible for it.

We were looking for a Java dev to join the team: a senior-level specialist, who is ready to take responsibility for the project. The client highlighted that it should be some sort of developing scientist: the perfect candidate takes part in conferences, publishes papers, makes discoveries. To cut a long story short, a nine-to-five person with an addiction to Jira tickets was not an option.

We had to find this scientific talent in Kyiv.

EVALUATING THE PUBLIC AND SCIENTIFIC ACTIVITY

Where do people like this work? In cool companies with similar development cultures that also create complex products. In Kyiv, there are a couple of such companies: either in healthcare or in CDN billing. In the majority of cases, these were outsourcing companies. We hoped our candidate would be interested in switching from outsourcing to product development.

We searched for people from these companies in social media using Google Custom Search and Graph Search. Before contacting a specialist we tracked their activity. We were to find out, whether a specialist:

• has a repository on GitHub;

• asks questions on Stack Overflow and what are these questions;

• answers colleagues questions on the same Stack Overflow;

• is a part of Java and databases communities.

Some smart buffed up candidates required even deeper analysis. What were their doctorates about? Did they have any scientific papers published and where? Which conferences did they attend as speakers?

Thanks to this approach, we managed to evaluate candidates’ technical skills, their ways of thinking, and approaches to work. Out of 38 candidates we chose one that fitted the team the best, and he got the offer.