EP #483 - Simon Youssef & Nenad Nikolic: How to Scale Your Product & Dev Team

Swisspreneur Show

Timestamps:

5:30 - When is it time to scale your dev team?

10:03 - Nearshore, offshore, or in-house?

12:37 - Can we trust AI to write code?

14h33 - Top criteria to hire developers

27:38 - Costly mistakes setting up a dev team

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About Simon Youssef & Nenad Nikolic:

Simon Youssef is the co-founder and CTO of the online bank neon. He holds a PhD in Computational Biophysics from Microsoft Research Cambridge and worked at Strategy& before co-founding neon in 2017.

Nenad Nikolic is the co-founder, Co-CEO and CTO of Holycode, and also the co-founder of MOVU and the former CIO of Bexio. He holds a MSc in Computer Science from the Faculty of Computer Science (Belgrade, Serbia) and worked for DeinDeal before joining Laurent Decrue on their 10+ year entrepreneurial journey in 2014.

During their chat with Silvan, Simon and Nenad discussed best practices for scaling your dev team. Naturally, the first question that poses itself when it comes to this topic is: When is it time to scale your dev team?

• It depends, obviously — but, generally speaking, the tech team needs to follow the growth of the company itself. At an early stage, you may be able to cut corners when it comes to security and backup strategy to move fast, but at some point you will need to start dedicating 25-30% of development time to these tasks.

• Don’t scale too early: big teams are costly and may run you to the ground. You should only have the tech stack that you absolutely need. Besides, if you scale too fast, your culture is going to go down the drain, and then you’ll be left with a whole lot of infighting and inefficiency.

• Don’t scale too late: waiting around for too long can result in a build-up of pressure on your developers that may very well burn them out.

Should you hire in-house developers? Or nearshore them? Offshore them, perhaps? neon did it all, and Simon can confidently say that nearshoring works best:

• If you have your dev team in-house in Switzerland, you are going to pay a lot. 2-3 engineers in a nearshoring location are equivalent to 1 engineer in Switzerland. Besides, you’ll be vulnerable to the “Hey, Joe!” principle: having the dev team, product managers and the management all in the same building means these latter two will be able to bother your dev team with random tasks which slow the dev team down overall.

• You also don’t want to offshore it, because then you cannot visit as often. It’s best to nearshore your dev team to somewhere within your timezone which has great flight connections to your main location.

What’s the top criteria to hire developers?

• Pay attention to your gut feeling when it comes to the culture fit. Don’t hire someone you wouldn’t want to spend 2h straight with. And don’t hire someone who is too proud or inflexible to be proven wrong. They may be fast when developing all on their own, but they will never be effective in a fast team.

• When hiring senior engineers, look for strong domain knowledge and experience. When hiring junior engineers, hire for brains, not experience.

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