Behind the scenes of an IT company

by Orest Mykhaylovych, Chief Operating Officer at Netminds 

IT companies are usually presented as a group of great engineers writing code in front of a monitor, or better, a few monitors, like on our homepage banner. Indeed, we are writing a lot of code, however, there are also many things happening behind the scenes.

And it is not only about cooperation, making architectural decisions, or product brainstorming… 

There is one more layer behind “behind the scenes” - business operations.

In this article, I would like to share some insights on how we at Netminds operate our business and keep our clients happy.

Recruitment process and further people care. Even though engineers work a lot of time with machines everything starts with people and human interactions. We do care whom we work with and carefully invite only matching people into each of our Teams. As a result, we can spend less time supervising each and every task our colleagues are working on. Just a few figures to illustrate the effort needed to achieve that: we usually consider up to 100 applications, handle around 20 HR interviews to recommend 10 best-matching candidates for technical interview, and only 2-3 of them get to the final interview and job offer for the best-matching candidate.

We have one of the best offices in Lviv and a nice, cozy space in Gdańsk. Most of our clients support hybrid and remote work, but having onsite meetings, workshops, or just fun gatherings is also beneficial for many of our employees.

Information Security is another big aspect that someone should take care of, and we do it by following the key principles of ISO 27001/27701 standards. And it is not just a formality - there are very practical security controls implemented, and they are already paying off. Just as an example, using MDM helps ensure that the workstations used by our colleagues are safe and compliant with defined policies and specific requirements from our clients. 

Hardware is one of the biggest operational costs aside from office and salaries. And it is far more complicated than just buying a laptop in the nearest store and giving it to an employee. We ensure cost efficiency, provide maintenance services when needed, and proactively handle planned replacements of hardware every few years, depending on team or role-specific needs.

Last, but definitely not least - finances and accounting. In order to hire in many locations, you need to be aware of local regulations, be flexible, and have lean processes, so we do have more than 8 types of contracts with employees in Denmark, Poland, Ukraine, Spain, and Canada, and there could be more.

Besides providing great engineers, we are taking care of these background routines and helping our Clients to focus on developing great products!