Tag: IT

Book: Marina Pereskokova “Mom, I’m a Team Lead!”

No comments

This year I’ve been reading fewer books on professional topics, but the ones I do read I choose very carefully. I didn’t pick up Mom, I’m a Team Lead! right away: first I listened to colleagues’ feedback, then I looked into what other readers were saying about it. And only after that did I decide it was worth reading myself — because the topic of growing from an individual contributor into a manager has always interested me. I myself spent a long time trying to sit on two chairs at once, until I finally moved fully into “pure” management (although I still don’t shy away from working with my hands when there’s no other choice).

The main goal the author set for herself in this book is to show how any manager needs to grow — starting almost from the very first steps, when just yesterday you were simply an executor (even a highly skilled one), and today you’re already responsible for other employees in the company. Marina breaks down the main fears and typical mistakes along this path. And that alone is extremely valuable, because not every young manager is lucky enough to have a good mentor who can help them deal with such fears and challenges.

I have to admit, though, that at first I reacted somewhat skeptically when Marina mentioned that she gained virtually all of her experience (10 years) in a single company with a single culture — one she was clearly very lucky with. Because she was genuinely fortunate: she had a manager who helped her grow, and the team relationships were built according to healthy rules, judging by her descriptions. But the harshest school of management is learned when things aren’t so rosy. And the lack of such tough experience is felt a bit in the book, because it’s easy to act “correctly” and “by the book” when the company and leadership allow you to. You need to be even more prepared to grow and solve problems in situations where circumstances make that much harder.

Of course, one might say: “Why work at such a company? Go find another!” But that’s not always possible — the job market doesn’t welcome everyone with open arms, especially young and inexperienced managers. And besides, there are no ideal companies in the world. There are better ones and worse ones, and far more of them will be not quite what you’d like (I personally believe that if all companies were ideal, strong managers would barely be needed at all). And finally — the harsh school gives you far more problem-solving skills, meaning you’ll be fully capable of working even in good conditions later on. But the other way around? That’s far from guaranteed.

Read more

Hiring: My Approaches

No comments

Somehow, over the years, although I’ve mostly been an IT manager, I’ve become something of a go-to person among HR and recruiting professionals. Probably because every manager needs to know how to hire the right specialists for their team.

For a few years now, I’ve been actively recommending the book “To Hire or Not to Hire?“ by Konstantin Borisov. It’s concise and very clear, covering most hiring-related topics in our field.

That said, there are a number of points that often don’t get the attention they deserve—and I’ve promised more than once in various discussions to eventually share my own approach. It seems that time has come.

Read more

Varlamov and Cyprus: A Bad Match

No comments

I know that not everyone likes Ilya Varlamov. Ukrainians, at the time, were very offended by his video about Ukraine (and honestly, for good reason—the video is very ambiguous). Still, sometimes he talks in a pretty interesting way about the countries he visits.

But experience shows that this “interestingness” can be very uneven—and sometimes not very accurate, if you have an analytical mind. And if you also know the country he’s talking about… For example, in his series 30 Years After the USSR—which included that infamous Ukraine episode—not every installment gives a full picture of what’s going on. His video about Belarus was also very superficial, basically about nothing. And the ones about the former “-stan” republics are more about refugees than about the countries themselves.

But I’ve been living in Cyprus for almost ten years now, so I’m always interested in reading and watching what people think when they visit this island—an island I already consider my second home. (You can only really call your homeland the country you were born in, but that doesn’t make it better than the others.) A few years ago Ilya Varlamov released a video about Cyprus as well, and even then it struck me as choppy and not very useful.

Read more

Book: Egor Yatsenko “IT Recruitment”

No comments

In recent years I’ve been reading quite a lot about hiring specialists, and I find it interesting to look at the topic from both sides. I interview candidates myself, and I’m constantly trying to get better at it. At the same time, when reading books about hiring, I always try to recall how I was interviewed, how I behaved as a candidate, and what I liked or disliked about the people doing the hiring.

About a year ago, Alpina released a new book on IT recruitment. I wasn’t familiar with the author, Egor Yatsenko, but the reviews were generally quite positive, so it would have been a shame not to pick it up.

With this kind of literature, though, it’s always important to understand the qualifications of the “trainer.” Egor Yatsenko is the co-founder of the recruitment agency Wanted: Profi, which specializes in hiring for the IT sector. In addition, he’s well known as a frequent speaker at various industry conferences, regularly giving talks, and he’s also involved in teaching sourcing (a professional term that essentially means targeted candidate search across different platforms).

Read more

Book: Pavel Volotovich, Alexey Kovalyov ‘From Panikovka to the Puck’

No comments

Photo albums about my hometown, Minsk, are my weakness. I try to buy almost every one that comes into my sight. So when the book From Panikovka to the Puck came out in December, I managed to order it through friends.

The book was “written” by the same authors who previously produced the biography of the Belarusian band Neuro Dubel. This time, they set out to show where and why the city’s youth hung out in the 1990s — what those places with names like “Panikovka” and “Puck” were, and what actually went on there. I put the word “written” in quotation marks because there’s hardly any real authorial text here. It’s mostly a collection of photographs and quotes — memories from various “scene” regulars of the time — with only very brief introductions by the authors here and there.

Unfortunately, the selection of respondents is very limited. Some are well known to many Belarusians, but most belong to a very narrow circle of people few have ever heard of — mostly the so-called bohemia: musicians, journalists, DJs, artists.

The book gives a certain snapshot of that era. After reading it, you’re left with the aftertaste of those years. At the same time, there are several issues that kept the book from meeting my expectations. Roughly speaking, they fall into two categories: the “places” described and the people chosen to comment on them.

Read more

The Death of Belarusian IT: How to Kill a Successful Industry

1 comment

No matter how Belarusian officials try to put a brave face on it, the exodus of IT from the country is a fact. And for many years the IT sector was the nation’s calling card and a fairly substantial share of GDP.

Just the other day I had to discuss yet again what will happen to this industry now, and when it might recover. Unfortunately, my forecast is bleak: Belarus will never again be an IT country. Or at least not for decades. I could be wrong—I’m no great economist—but I’ll try here to lay out the considerations on which I base this view.

But first—a bit of history.

Belarus didn’t become strong in IT out of thin air. In Soviet times, Minsk was an assembly shop, including for computing hardware. It was in Belarus that the large “Minsk” computers were made, and later the ES personal computers, which people chased after even when I was a teenager, because they were IBM-compatible machines you could buy for home use and, for better or worse, enjoy the benefits of a personal computer.

Read more

Books Worth Reading (2017–2022)

No comments

I am sometimes asked which books I would recommend reading. For the blog, this is generally not difficult — it’s enough to open all posts with the tag “I-recommend.” But since it’s been almost five years now since I revived my blog and began writing about the books I’ve read, I decided to put together a selection of non-fiction books I’ve read during this time that fall into the category of “you must read them.”

I have already written detailed reviews of all these books, so this time I’ve selected only the very best, grouped them by topic. For each book I give only brief recommendations on why they are worth reading, but you can always open the link to the full review. I hope this will be useful to someone. So, let’s begin.

Read more

Book: Konstantin Borisov “How a Good Developer Can Avoid Becoming a Bad Manager”

No comments

One of the best books I read last year was a relatively short but incredibly useful guide by Konstantin Borisov on conducting interviews—“To Hire or Not to Hire? Or How to Interview a Developer.” I now recommend it to everyone, whether they are conducting interviews themselves or preparing to be interviewed. It gives you a much clearer understanding of what a potential employer is like and whether they are worth considering.

But Konstantin Borisov also wrote another book—“How a Good Developer Can Avoid Becoming a Bad Manager.” The topic may not seem obvious at first, but it’s actually incredibly relevant. In the IT industry, it’s well known that top specialists often get promoted simply because they excel at their tasks. One day, you’re a great developer, the next, you’re mentoring a couple of interns. Before you know it, you’re made a lead developer, then given a team to manage, and suddenly—you’re a manager.

I went through a similar path myself, though for a long time, I tried to balance both roles. I loved mentoring specialists and building teams, but at the same time, I still wanted to be a hands-on developer. Eventually, I realized that trying to do both was making me worse at each, and I finally made the decision to fully transition into management.

Read more

A Shoemaker Without Shoes, an IT Country Without IT

No comments

In recent years, Cyprus has increasingly been promoting the idea of transforming the country into a haven for IT. I recently wrote about why it’s still far from being an IT Mecca, and today I’ll go into more detail about why this seemingly sound initiative continues to stall.

Many expat IT professionals dream of moving the country forward into the future and breaking its dependency on tourism. They understand that relying solely on tourism isn’t sustainable. The “Mediterranean laziness” mindset often leads to maximizing profits from tourists with minimal investment, but this approach can’t last forever. Most Cypriot hotels lag 20–30 years behind their continental counterparts in terms of room quality for the same star rating. While 5-star hotels are generally decent, their prices are comparable to the cost of a flight to the moon.

However, while Cypriots have at least some understanding of tourism (having relied on it for so long), their grasp of IT is far worse. Add to this the “laziness factor,” where government offices operate for just a few hours a day (and not all of them even then). Requests for refunds of overpaid taxes can take 7–8 years to process (I’m not exaggerating), and unemployment benefits will likely be issued only after you’ve starved to death—applications take a minimum of four months to process from the time you lose your job.

Read more

Cyprus: The IT Mecca of the Mediterranean (Not Really)

2 comments

I decided to write about Cyprus and IT. Perhaps this post will upset some people, but I’m sharing my perspective as I see it.

I’ve been meaning to write about IT on our island for a while, but recently I found an additional reason to do so. Over the past few months, I’ve noticed an odd wave of posts in various communities, like: “Looking for a job in Cyprus, currently living in Sunny Podunkville, open to opportunities,” or “Vacationing in Cyprus, skilled and talented—if anyone has work to offer, let me know.”

Alright, I’m exaggerating a little, but overall, there has indeed been a noticeable increase in queries from people who don’t live in Cyprus but have clearly read or heard somewhere that Cyprus is now a fantastic place for the IT industry. I want to explain what it’s actually like, what the advantages are, and what the downsides are.

Let’s start with the fact that IT as an industry has never really existed on the island. I moved here in 2014, and back then, the IT sector was quite uniform. Thanks to offshore regulations and British law, many Forex companies had established a strong presence here, along with a few others connected to the financial sector.

Read more