Does the level of happiness of employees depend on interesting tasks? Tell SKB Kontur, Dodo Pizza, Staply and Alternativa Games

Although now there are very few people who will be interested in “cookies” and “kicker in the office”, Eychary still in the job descriptions automatically emphasize the convenient location of the office, free coffee and great team building. But this is rather the tip of the iceberg, a pleasant addition to the fact that it should help the employee to maintain a passion for his work and not burn out in the first year of work in the company. And “under the water” are interesting and diverse tasks that challenge our skills and force us to acquire new knowledge, and thanks to which every day we come to work with pleasure.

We continue to discuss the quality of companies for which they receive the highest rating from their employees on our service. In the last issue, employees of Kolesa Group, Evil Martians and Wrike told why and how much competent management in the company is important to them, and today we asked Staply, SKB Kontur, Dodo Pizza and Alternativa Games how they understand the quality of “Interesting tasks” as having Such tasks affect the level of happiness of employees and the development of the company as a whole.
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Alternativa Games is an international group of companies that develops and supports multiplayer online games and services.

Evaluation of the company on "My Circle".

Andrey Nikulin (software developer):

I consider interesting tasks to be those that do not have a typical solution, which challenge your skills, or need to be shown to perform them.
fantasy. Our company often encounters such tasks, I think that for game-devil this is the norm.

If developers do not dilute routine tasks (and they still need to be done) interesting (they may end), this may lead to their fading. I would not stay long in a company where there are no interesting problems.


Wall of Fame in the office of Alternativa Games.

Daria Stal (project coordinator):

Making games is interesting in itself :) There is always an element of novelty and new discoveries, even in the usual way.

It is important that people do not come to work only for the sake of money, but to do what they are interested in, what develops them and gives inner satisfaction. The task of the company and a good leader is to see what is interesting for the employee and to give an opportunity to improve their skills.

If the tasks are uninteresting, the employee will not develop, the work will become a routine, and sooner or later the employee will leave.


Office Alternativa Games.

Julia Kostyleva (ASO specialist):

Interesting tasks do not require dry mechanical work. You see that the result depends on your ideas. This may be an interesting approach to the mechanics of the game or an unusual look at the advertising campaign.

We really believe in people who work in
companies, and give much room for their ideas and plans. At least always
listen.

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Dodo Pizza is the largest chain of pizzerias in Russia, which already has more than 460 pizzerias in 12 countries, and combines the classic pizza business with IT-technologies.

Evaluation of the company on "My Circle".

Sergey Gryazev (product owner)

Only one thing can be said about work at Dodo: the only thing that annoys is the way to and from work. This is the best indicator of the quality of the tasks facing us daily.

Boris Goulay (developer):

If you have to think about development, this is an interesting task. Platform tasks, as a rule, are obviously interesting, and business, as lucky. Here a lot depends on the developer and freedom in making technical decisions, which allows the culture of the company.
Writing a WEB front is usually dull. But if you take a new framework that you are interested in learning, then the task will become much more interesting.


Office Dodo Pizza in Syktyvkar.

Our company easily agrees to adapt new technologies. When we were rewriting the front on React, we could give this task to a team already familiar with the framework, and it would do the task quickly. But our management understands when to stand to gain pending benefits. In this case - to increase the competence of the development. Therefore, we have such a high rating.

A sane developer understands that absolutely all tasks can not be interesting. But this only works if there is something interesting on the horizon. Then you can suffer.

Making the task interesting is the work of the architect and team leader, not business. Business needs a result, how it will be sought, it does not matter. But the architect and team leader can offer the team an interesting solution even for boring, at first glance, tasks. This is where their qualifications are manifested.

The interest of the tasks is the subjective assessment of the employer by the employees First of all, it should be considered as a method of non-material motivation and retention of employees. If specialists are not interested in working for you, then their salary will not be kept even above the market. But this rule works in the opposite direction! Employers in the IT market would be worth paying more attention to how interesting it is for them to work. Attention in this matter allows a great reduction in turnover.



Vitaly Pomozov (developer):

An interesting task is a relative concept. What is interesting to one developer may seem a chore and boredom for another.

The scale of Dodo Pizza allows you to find your place in the company. There are B2B and B2C directions, a beautiful front-end, a stern back-end, Machine Learning, SRE, BI. If it is interesting to be closer to the business - the company encourages trips to the pizzeria, for testing and observing the features that are made. Like system programming, you can sit back and do it.



When performing uninteresting, routine, simple tasks, the developer ceases to develop - this negatively affects the quality of the developed system, increases the turnover of personnel, which further aggravates the quality of the system. The company's objectives usually follow the business, it is hardly possible to simply invent ideas that are not important to the business now. However, in any task you can put refactoring, optimization, redesign and other things, making the task more interesting.

Very many programmers change jobs, motivating this is not interesting tasks in the past work. Interesting tasks support the fire in the eyes of the programmer, forcing him to create better solutions. Few people speak at mitapakh telling about uninteresting tasks.

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Staply is the first Russian business messenger with project functionality.

Evaluation of the company on "My Circle".

Vasily Ereshko (programmer):

I want to work on interesting tasks. They make you think, apply something new, use non-standard approaches.

I expected our assessment to be high, because I worked in a number of other companies, where the approach to development was radically different. Working there is, with rare exceptions, just a routine when you are waiting for the weekend as a deliverance.

If the tasks are uninteresting - the decline in the quality of the product begins, the eternal debug instead of development. No, routine work is important too. The main thing is that there is something besides her and not only after the full moon on Sunday in even months of the year. Developers should be forced to think, not copy-paste the same thing from project to project.



Ilya Tarasov (senior iOS developer):

An interesting task is not “another stool” that you made, received money and forgot, but a process during which you get a lot of new knowledge, “bigwigs” and, ultimately, job satisfaction. We make our product, dear, not heartless "outsourcing".

Developers are different, it is enough for someone to close the cards and get paid, but for the most part, good specialists need food for the brain in the form of interesting tasks. If the brain is starving, then the body is looking for the best conditions for development. To make the task interesting, you need to give more freedom in making decisions to the developer.

Without interesting tasks, the company will not have the best specialists; there will be staff turnover and burned deadlines.

Yulia Trofimova (QA Engineer):

An interesting task is a task from the field of human interests. Feasible, but difficult.

In our company, you can and should invent tasks yourself. It is easy to interest a person in the process, if you give him complete freedom to realize their creative potential.

Interesting tasks are important to save the team. If a company gives a person the opportunity to do what he likes, then the person will not leave such a company.



Alexander Momotov (junior product designer):

In my opinion, “interesting problems” are tasks, in the process of solving which you can discover something new. It can be both a technology and an approach to work.

With us, any member of the team can try on the authority of a colleague and, thus, learn something new. For us, it is considered absolutely normal that the mobile developer can help with the backend, and the designer himself will correct the layout. That is why our company has such a high score. Did I expect this? Perhaps yes.

If the developer to set uninteresting tasks, there will be many bugs. You need to interest the developer to improve the product. If the developer thinks about the quality of the product, the code will be clean and easy to maintain.

My personal experience suggests that if an employee works on tasks of the same type every day and doesn’t feel growth on himself, this leads to burnout and loss of motivation. A person in such a situation will most likely change jobs or will try to find other interesting tasks (for example, change technology) than continue to work further. This is a very subtle point on which it is difficult to give advice, but I will try: try to feel your team and give your colleagues a little more freedom in choosing your place in the company's processes.

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SKB Kontur is a developer of web services for business and accounting, which is used by both global corporations and small entrepreneurs.

Evaluation of the company on "My Circle".

Alena Mokrousova (development manager):

The task is interesting if it contains the creation of new value, the solution of significant problems, the development of new technologies. Contains a study.

It all depends on the personal qualities of the developer. Someone is interested in a research, a new tool or a way to solve it, the importance of a task is important for someone, why this task is needed, how many users it will bring happiness, money will bring. Someone is interested in competitiveness, someone needs discussion and teamwork.

That is, if you need to make a task interesting for a developer, you need to go from a specific developer, and not from abstract characteristics of the task.



Daria Svalova (developer):

All have their own interests, and they also change over time. If your interests at the moment coincided with the subject of tasks in the company, it means that the company has interesting tasks.

It all depends on the person. Someone needs an interest from work, money to someone, in order not to be touched. On average, it seems that it is necessary to alternate uninteresting tasks, if any, with interesting ones for the developer.


Contour's stand at Innoprom 2018.

Igor Lukanin (devrel):

Each engineer decides for himself what tasks are interesting for him. As a rule, these are tasks that allow you to express yourself as a professional, but at the same time leave the zone of professional comfort.

The contour is large and growing. In it you can find products and teams in which engineers will work on tasks that are interesting to them, and if they wish, they will change the team to one where they make the product more interesting for them, use a more interesting programming language, solve more large-scale problems. We expected a high mark, because we know from within what our tasks are.


Summer Festival "Music of the Summer", July 2018.

At the same time, we understand that for some engineers, our tasks will not be the most appropriate: Contour makes products for business (B2B), while some are interested in working on products that solve the problems of “ordinary people” (B2C).

Uninteresting tasks will not allow developers to grow, their motivation will fall, and they will leave. Keeping team members motivated, including through interesting tasks, is an important function of development team managers and team leaders. This needs to be learned so that the engineers who they are responsible for grow professionally. To make a task interesting, you need to understand the developer’s motivation - to understand what interests him, to either find the appropriate task, or change the requirements of the task so that it becomes interesting. It is remarkable that after reaching a certain high level, an engineer acquires the ability to find interesting tasks for himself, to find interesting in usual tasks and to bear responsibility for his own professional development.

Having interesting tasks helps to bring talented engineers to the company and keep them for a long time. It may be a problem that the “interesting task for the engineer” is not always the task that directly benefits the business. Therefore, the desire to find interesting problems for each engineer can lead to local inefficiency, but over a long period of time - which is typical for product development - more experienced engineers who have grown up on interesting problems will bring more benefits.