Where and how to open a development center?

In this article I will not touch on the issues of organizational and business, such as comparing rental prices and choosing suitable areas, repairing them, purchasing furniture and equipment, because at long distances these costs become a drop in the sea of ​​wages paid.

The first question to solve is the city in which it makes sense to open a development center. The main “recyclable resource” of the center is intelligent developers and testers, if there are few of them in the city, there is no point in opening up. Any pies will not entice a sufficient number of bright heads from other cities.

Let's compare million cities:

* the value is very approximate, calculated on a rather “esoteric” metric (a relatively well-known number of .net developers living in Ufa is taken, the proportion to those of them who put their data in My Circle is calculated, and the total number of IT specialists is multiplied by this correction factor city), but for our problem is enough.

The second factor is the salary forks in the selected cities:

We get that the best candidates for opening a development center in terms of saturation and non-overestimation of the personnel market are Yekaterinburg, Kazan and Rostov-on-Don.

When you decide that the smartest, see who the competition

* for the keyword "Programmer", the state at the beginning of April 2019

Banks have mercilessly “vacuumed the market” and have not yet come up with normal means of protection against them, but for our benefit, for some developers, working in a bank is not comme il faut.

What will be important for employees?

The "sanitary and hygienic" minimum for any developer when choosing a company is:

• convenient location of the office, with large parking and stopping within walking distance;
• thoughtful office with comfortable workplaces and dedicated areas for meetings and recreation;
• availability of a cafe, gym, etc.

We turn to the most important issue for business - wages. Here a lot depends on the interestingness of the project. To form the backbone and not lose a useful developer, you need to add 10% to the median of the salary market. This is provided that the project is ambitious and interesting. If we cannot promise such a project, the increase should be at least 20%.

It is also important to use the Total Rewards modern practices to attract, retain and motivate employees to ensure strategy and business success.

Consider each of the main factors.

Attraction:

47% salary
41% professional growth opportunity
41% self-realization and personal growth
40% learning opportunity
35% work content, projects, tasks
34% work schedule
32% comfortable office and workplace
32% career opportunity.

Hold:

45% salary
42% work schedule
41% work content, projects, tasks
39% professional growth opportunity
38% team and colleagues
38% atmosphere and teamwork
38% possibility of self-realization and personal growth
33% comfortable office and workplace
31% work autonomy and learning opportunity
30% learning opportunity

Motivation:

44% salary
36% work content, projects, tasks
35% team and colleagues
34% atmosphere and teamwork
33% recognition of achievements and contributions to work
33% understanding of their responsibility for the work
33% professional growth opportunity
33% possibility of self-realization and personal growth
31% work autonomy and a high degree of freedom
30% comfortable office and workplace

Do not forget about the benefits that are necessary for the formation of employee loyalty: health care, support in difficult situations, corporate events, training.

How to work when no one else knows you?

The key to success of any enterprise is a strong and cohesive team. To form a strong backbone of the staff who will help the project survive, you need to seek help from the ideological superprofessionals of the city. And already on their recommendations to recruit the first team, not stint on the high salary for them.

In the future, these key characters will be excellent mentors and will help with the selection of less experienced but promising candidates.

How to work on HR brand the company?

Regardless of the size of the city, the developer community is rather compact and news (especially negative) spread fairly quickly. But, in order to create, whatever the image of the company, the majority of developers, in addition to direct communication with the first hundred potential employees, will have to spend a lot of time and effort on organizing meetings and mini-conferences. You need to participate in the maximum number of significant get-togethers and seriously engage in a useful and really sought-after sponsorship course at one of the popular online education sites.

The most important and difficult thing is to form a clear and explicit image, for example, “A company that gives 100% authority to agile teams and never breaks scrum” or “A company in which you will definitely become a guru in the field of CLR and management of garbage collection in loaded projects. Or even “Yes, we are a small company, but with us mongo, go and k8s”.

The message can be any of the interesting areas for development. The main thing is to have the opportunity to oppose themselves to the awkward giants of the local market. And, you must always answer for the words!

Adequate developers go either to interesting projects for competencies that increase their value in the market, or to boring ones, but for big money.

Summing up

Everything that is written here is not a guide to action. Do not immediately run to open an office in Rostov-on-Don. These are just vectors to explore possible directions. In any case, the main thing that needs to be done is to find suitable “First People” and be able to captivate them with an idea, to create a “magnet of attraction”. Only after that, rush headlong into an adventure.