A Talent Thesis for The New Digital Era

5 min readSep 28, 2020

We’re hiring! Feel free to jump right into our job board or scroll down if you wanna get a pick of our mindset.

Are we in the ICT economy?

Contrary to popular belief, software companies are less about technology and more about people. The years of training and experience, are only one of the many factors needed to solve problems as a team. However, we somehow relay heavily on those factors to shape our teams and our culture.

Yes, character is key and yes, companies often go to great lengths to measure various KPIs, optimize employee satisfaction, create processes and many other actions to ensure proper work environments. Still, as individuals it is hard to evaluate if we rise to our best potential. We can hardly ever clarify if our career is the best match to our abilities, or if we would enjoy life more should we had made different choices?

There is a hidden gap to the whole process and the exponential evolution of technology plays a large part to it. We live in an era with 21st century amazing technologies, we still seek 20th century skills and we work in a world not far from 19th century processes. It is logical that the two latter, need time to keep up with the pace. And there lies a huge opportunity.

Since we have the technology, now we need to make companies that better
focus on the talent economy.

Decoding Talent in the new Digital Era

The good news is that developers nowadays have great options. The demand is clearly larger than the supply and research points out to a larger gap in the future. However, staff retention has been falling for the past decade. It is clear that during the unprecedented disruption that the ICT industry is experiencing, software companies need to solve the talent puzzle from the beginning.

Developers grow their skills into new levels of complexity, while software companies have a great deal of tools and processes available to reach out. In addition, recent breakthroughs in emerging technologies such as AI and ML, will soon bring new waves of change, again and again.

Nevertheless, we’re still driven from technical matching instead of retention. The second derives from the successful mix of skills on a team level, that will enable motivation, results and growth for all parties.

Being in the talent economy, means we need to answer also questions for the person behind the code:

What are the personal traits that make someone great on what they do? What makes them tick?
Do they like leading human engagement through dependability, resolution and collaboration? Or do they prefer to deep dive in long term engineering puzzles?
In extend, how well have they defined their personal roadmap and what do they need to manifest their full potential?
We’re made of stories, not CVs. What are the ones that are most proud of?
Respectively, what are the actual needs of the company and how can we explore a long term fit?

Our Approach

In 2019 we were faced with tremendous growth opportunities and our company once again started to grow. Although it might seem trivial, growing a company is a huge decision, one that can transform lives for the better, if you build your company properly. Bellow are the 3 key transformation pillars we work on:

Project Management
Its a common secret that most companies confuse project management with coordination. This is a dire gap that until today creates painful debt between teams and client-company relationships. We needed to future proof new projects and transform intensity to a controlled, measurable and fulfilling process that drive our business (and not the other way around). We spent more than six months digitizing our way of work and dodging the downsides that arise with it. Most importantly we integrated technical and business functions in order to promote transparency and clear understanding of what we do as a team. As a result, individual independentness and ownership is the result instead of just an daunting mantra.

Product Operations
We needed to treat all projects and services as products. It is impossible to manage complexity and track multiple routines if we can’t have an integrated picture of what its going on under the hood. Processes must be there to help us prioritize, communicate and accumulate value. Simple solutions such as account roadmaps, versioning and basic CI/CD processes, transform both ours and the client’s experience.

Technical Excellence
As a company driven 100% by technology, we hate the fact that coding & UX can be misunderstood as a commodity by customers. It is one of the most complex and meritorious jobs while quality often passes unrecognized and underpaid from the market. We take huge pride in our ability to communicate the difference. In extend, we make sure we invest on necessary knowledge acquisition and encourage individual training opportunities.

In case you’re interested

We don’t have the perfect methodology, yet. But we do keep it personal, honest and above all, simple. On our job board HERE, you can see a list of various openings that we’re looking forward hearing from you!

More specifically some links with current positions:

Not sure? Check our Meta-Position!

Candidates often get discouraged from thinking openly just by the notion of being misunderstood through a seemingly formal process. We do have some preferences like full-time commitment, background on certain technologies, but we provide all the flexibility for you too uncovering an opportunity to work together in various ways.

This is how the meta-position of Technology Problem Solver came up.

It is based on what we call the simplicity principle of our thesis. Instead of worrying if you prefer a contract role instead of full-time hiring, or our remote capacity, or exact technical matching, just tells us how you see a potential fit and value working with us.

FYI our key areas of interest are:

Amazon Web Services
JavaScript (preferably with abilities on application frameworks) combined with HTML/CSS skills
Python and respective frameworks such as Django and DRF.
PHP (we have some really cool custom or WordPress-based projects)
Swift and Java (or Kotlin) for native mobile apps
Project management with respective workflows on JIRA, Gitlab and other tools.

Who are we?

We are a powerful software company changing things across various industries (we really do). We’re located in the centre of Athens and we’re part of Found.ation’s partner ecosystem leading some very innovative tech work.

We love working with APIs, playing with data and riding the wave of modern technologies such as serverless and deep learning.

About the author:

This post was written by George Kary, Director of Operations at Pixelocracy. Would you like to reach out? Feel free to contact him on LinkedIn.