From Sys Admin to C++ Developer - Ivan Kostruba

00:00

I ask people why it is good to work at the company where you're working at. So they're like ask them to sell me the company. What good they can tell about that.

00:12

When did you transition to move from being a system administrator to a software engineer and how did you make that decision?

00:22

The decision itself was quite spontaneous. In fact, I think I was back at university in my last years of uni, which I didn't graduate from. I was working as system administrators and I was having these thoughts that I already told that I don't see it very much perspective for myself back then. I think I was lucky that programming was just something very interesting to me. I spent nights trying to make my code work, programming graphics and I know C and C++ utilities and stuff and helping my university fellows with their homework and stuff. It was just fascinating for me.

01:03

And I know somehow I think it was a friend of someone who knew me, something like that. They recommended me to that person and they approached me and said, "Hey, I have this small business and we need a programmer." It was a internet service provider. And they want some in-house software development. So they asked me if I'm up to it. Basically asked me a few questions like, "Hey, do you know how to code? Do you know how computer work?" I said, "Yes, I know everything." They say, "You're hired." Like that. And I thought it's something that I wanted to try long ago. I didn't take active steps to change the work, but opportunity just presented itself and I just grabbed it both hands and went with it. It wasn't best job world, but it was a start.

02:05

How much of that was luck as opposed to luck that you made?

02:09

It was very spontaneous. I never expected it. I know besides development, developing my programmer skills, I did nothing to get this job. So yeah, I think it was partially luck and partially I was prepared to grab this chance. If I didn't already have any skills as a programmer, I couldn't take that chance.

02:31

It sounds like you followed your own curiosity there.

02:36

You may say so. It wasn't super rational decision because yes, I thought that as a programmer, as this developer, I can do better job and earn more money and be more important for the business. So it was the rational part in it. But at the same time, a person approached me. I never knew this guy and he offered me this job. So it wasn't very thought out decision back then. But yeah, I thought, hey, this is my chance. I thought about becoming developer for a long time, and this is the chance I need to the try. I need to see how it goes. So yeah, curiosity was part of it. And in the end, it played out well.

03:26

How did that cross over with you not finishing university?

03:29

After I started working almost full-time, I start making some money for myself and well, probably I didn't made the best choice with the university. So I just started seeing that what they teach me at uni is just outdated or unrelated to the work I do. And I thought I'm better off just teaching myself. And luckily in that field, you don't necessarily need diploma to be hired. You need to demonstrate your skill. So if you're curious, if you are willing to spend some time learning, you are set up for making some progress in there.

04:19

How would you describe your ideal working relationship with work?

04:23

First of all, for me, what's very important is that the product or service that company does actually helps people and creates something useful. So it may be industry or telecom or something like that. There are companies that do, I don't know, tools for stock exchange, trade and core currency exchange, Bitcoin, stuff like that. And they basically say we are here to make money. We know that it is financial speculations. And we creating tools for financial speculations. They don't really create a new value, but they create a lot of money and we are here to grab that. This is what I'm not considering for myself. I got some offers from companies like that and I declined all them because I want to create something that actually helped people. And I would seek for the same mentality in the whole team. In the management that we are here, not just for profits, but we want to actually create something. If we using the big words, make the world a better place, but just create something helpful that people actually need. And yeah, I would look for that.

05:50

How helpful does that thing have to be? Because it's quite difficult... Everyone wants to do something I think that has some kind of net positive contribution to society, but deciding how much, how big that net contribution should be in your decision making process is sometimes not quite as easy to grasp.

06:12

For me, it doesn't need to be 100% altruistic thing to help I know homeless kitties to find their new home, which would be great, but I don't think it pays very well.

06:29

Well, what about the homeless kitties [inaudible 00:06:31]. Come home.

06:34

Yeah. I mean, it should be something that also pays decently for me, but one of the best feelings that I had is when I worked in automotive and I could see a car on the street and I knew that a code that I wrote runs it in that car, safety features cars, and they say, "Hey, we really get the reports that our safety equipment actually saves lives."

07:03

What process do you go through now in order to find work? Do you have a set way that you go about it practically?

07:13

Right now, I know it's very difficult to find decent experienced software engineer because I did some interviewing myself and I know that we hire a small percentage of all candidates that we interview. So there is a high demand. And thus, I think in later five to eight years, I never actually actively looked for a job. It's normally just people contacting me. And if it sounds interesting and the benefits is all right, I usually just agree to talk with the team. I'm curious about all the things people do around me. So I talk with them, they tell me about what they do. Yeah. I tell them about myself.

08:08

Sometimes we find that it's, I don't know, either the project is not very interesting to me, or maybe I'm too expensive for this company or something else. Then I just go with the process the company has normally. It's even more about just talking to different people and ideally people from the team you are going to work with, because it's very important to get to know the people you are going to work with. And many companies now practice something like a lunch together with somebody from the company or maybe with a team when you can have a informal discussion about anything. And that's something I appreciate. And it's always nice to, I don't know, just have this gut feeling about the people. I think we human beings, we actually, our brain is wired to make quick decisions about other people. And those are mostly correct, but still, I think these gut feelings, they are very valuable and I try to have those in the process.

09:26

And this is why I don't like the approach that very big companies has. And they have a big team of interviewers and you just talk with random people and then you got assigned to some team and it's just somebody else. And again, as someone who also hires people or at least interviews people, I also prefer that the person I interviewed and they said, "Hey, I want to work with this guy. I want this guy in my team because I already have some contact with him." So this kind of more personal approach. Well, I appreciate it.

10:11

Those personal interactions that mean so much and give us so much context in those decisions, they're a two-way street. They involve naturally conversations from the interviewer, but conversations from someone who's trying to understand what the work is actually like. What questions do you typically ask and do they change depending on who you're talking to?

10:36

First of all, I gave up on the idea that I will get the full impression of what the work is before I actually get to work on it, because, I don't know, it never was that way. You may ask a lot of questions on how you distribute tasks and how you evaluate performance and how you interact with different teams. So of course you get information, but this hands on impression is always give you so much more and there is no way to get this impression other than try. I would say, I heard of practices with some companies, they actually invite people to actually work with them for a day or a week, they pay the candidates for that. So they really get hands on experience.

11:30

That's an interesting approach, but I never experienced that myself and it's of course time consuming. But the important questions that I ask, I think I picked them up from some article in the internet. I ask people, for example, why it is good to work at the company where you're working at. So they're like, ask them to sell me the company, what good they can tell about that. Yes, of course, I asked about the impressions from interacting with managers and with the team and how they feel about company. So I ask more about impressions and just experiences that people had already working in the company.

12:27

So it sounds like you're asking very few questions about your own kind of situation. You're actually asking questions that are all about trying to uncover how someone else who's currently inside that company views their own work.

12:42

Right. It's not a lot of questions. So it's usually two or three sometimes, not much. It doesn't take that long. I think that a majority of modern IT companies, when it comes to software engineering, they work more or less in the same manner. There are differences, maybe somebody have extremely flat hierarchies or maybe more rigid hierarchies and specific tools and stuff, but it's more or less standardized. So it doesn't give you very much information. And I, myself, I don't have very much preference in that. I can adapt to tools. I can learn new tools in new variations of organization of process. And I think it's not very important. It's more or less the same. I never had an impression that, hey, they use this tool or this way of organization and it makes work that much different that I need to seek for that specific thing later. Not really.

13:55

Ivan, thank you for sharing so much detail in the way that you go about figuring out where to work. If only we could all have that first impression that you had in that first experience. If we could figure out how to make that happen for everyone, I feel like we'd be there.

14:17

Right. Yes. We need to try this new approach in hiring people. Just randomly approach them and say, "Hey, do you want to work as software engineer?"