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Ivan Dragosan, Country Director at Symphony Serbia – We are playing with limits of IT implementation
Source: eKapija
Tuesday, 10.10.2017.
15:01
Tuesday, 10.10.2017.
15:01
Comments
(Ivan Dragosan) Symphony, one of the leading IT companies in the region, has recently celebrated a year of activities in Serbia. The company is known for its extraordinary projects in which it cooperates with numerous companies from the Silicon Valley. The Belgrade office, for example, has worked on the development of “endless” computers, analysis of human DNA, smart glasses...
Ivan Dragosan, Country Director at Symphony Serbia, talks to eKapija about these projects, as well as the company's plans in the country, the opening of a new center in Novi Sad and the results made in the past year.
We also talked to Dragosan about the business philosophy of Symphony and about whether it was hard to find people capable of working with advanced technologies and new-generation programming languages in Serbia.
eKapija: You have recently celebrated a year of business activities in Serbia. How satisfied are you with what you've achieved in the past period and did you fear that you would not succeed?
– To be honest we didn't fear the lack of success as we had already had 10 years of work and experience behind us. Furthermore, we had already developed similar activities in Sarajevo, and that center is quite successful.
Symphony had very ambitious goals regarding what it wanted to achieve in Belgrade. Our idea was to build a community of 50-60 employees, which is especially important for us in order to maintain the basic values of the company and quality relations within it.
This market is full of talented people and we were entirely sure that we would succeed in finding people who meet the high criteria of both us and our clients. Now, when we have around 35 people, we still believe in this. The plan is to employ around twenty more workers, but we do not burden ourselves with deadlines and strict plans when it comes to the arrival of new people to the company.
eKapija: Tell us something more about how Symphony chooses new colleagues.
– The road traveled by Symphony in order to be able to work on the projects it works on was a thorny one. We have had enough knowledge and luck to succeed and this has enabled us to position ourselves well in the Silicon Valley market, which most of our clients come from.
The demands there are very strong and everything done gets recognized, whether good or bad, so, when you decide to expand your operations, you must make sure to maintain the quality.
Our clients expect to find in us not just coders, but also engineers capable of providing them with support in conceiving and developing an idea and in coding itself. What clients get, in cooperation with us, is quality and an engineering approach, as well as a partnership in the process from the idea to its realization.
At the same time, this means that our employees often face entirely new, unfamiliar technologies and demands.
Some candidates fail to pass the selection process not because they are bad at what they do, but because they are not trying to find out what is going on behind the surface eagerly enough, to understand the basic programming concepts. The approach of looking at the big picture enables an easy shift from one technology to another. This is the kind of people we are looking for.
Our selection process is not simple and it is not easy to satisfy our demands.
eKapija: What does this process actually look like and how hard is it to pass through it?
– Our initial step was a conventional one, placing a job ad. The response was great, as expected, but the results, regarding quality, were negligible. It simply turned out that the best experts had already been employed by good companies and that the last thing on their mind was to follow and reply to job ads.
(Symphony team in Belgrade) We performed an analysis in December 2016 and determined that fewer than 5% of those who had applied for the job had received an offer from us.
This is why we had to change the approach and we decided to identify the best candidates and try to contact them and offer them to try to pass our selection process and become members of the Symphony team.
Interestingly, the majority of them said that they were not planning to change jobs and that they were satisfied with their jobs. Nevertheless, many of those who had still come to see what kind of projects we worked on had expressed the desire to join us.
The explanation is simple. People who do a good job in the IT industry are also well paid here, but they are still looking to be challenged. They want to use new technologies and new programming languages in working on interesting projects, which is exactly what we are able to offer.
An important part of the selection process is for the candidates to spend a working day with us, to be active in practical tasks, but also to talk to their future colleagues and see whether the environment and the atmosphere here suits them.
eKapija: Symphony has also announced the opening of new development centers, in Novi Sad, Thessaloniki, Sofia and Skopje. Why these cities and how many people will be employed there?
– As we've already mentioned, we want to create hubs, small communities of experts capable of maintaining the key values and the culture of the company. That is our guiding idea.
When our employees in Belgrade and Sarajevo developed the business for around 200 new people, we decided not to expand through our existing centers, but to open new ones, although we would have been able to carry out everything much more easily and in a simpler and more cost-effective manner in Belgrade, for example.
Although this means going down a longer, more complicated and riskier road, we opted to do so, as each new center, new city and new country brings something new with it. New knowledge, new approaches and the new culture of our future employees enable us to constantly create new values.
Symphony currently has around 100 employees in San Francisco, Sarajevo and Belgrade, so it's a great challenge to increase the number of employees to that extent while maintaining the quality and the principles of our business operations. This is a big expansion, but our approach, as always, is to give ourselves time to reach the right people.
eKapija: How hard is it for companies from this region to be competitive in the global IT market?
– To our clients, who mostly come from the USA, there is not much difference between Serbia and Germany, for example. It's all Europe to them and they rarely have prejudices of any kind. What's important to them is whether the job is being done well. That's all they care for.
The achievements made are by far the most important criterion.
eKapija: What have the achievements of Symphony been? What are the most important projects you've worked on that still bring you new clients?
– The number of projects we've worked on in the past ten years is truly large.
I'd just like to note that we are especially recognized in the segment of smart glasses. These are ODG smart glasses, used, for example, in space stations by the NASA astronauts. The concept in question is the concept of augmented reality, as the glasses provide the wearer with extensive information and are a computer-based supplement which makes performing various tasks drastically easier.
Our engineers in Belgrade worked intensively on the development of the very complex software which powers these glasses. We are also working on the so-called “endless” computer, which provides access to information available on the internet only even when there is no internet connection.
The computer practically downloads the data it determines to belong to the key spheres of interest of the user in order for them to be able to continue using the data offline. Furthermore, the computer is capable of learning about the user, thereby reducing the probability of missing important data while working offline.
Here in Belgrade, we are active in a wide variety of projects. We developed smart watches for children, which enable parents to know where their children are and which can be used for emergency calls and for sending location details to pre-defined recipients. There was also a project in the field of DNA analysis, which aims to help identify potential diseases on time based on the genetic composition.
All these projects are very complex, but that's part of the challenge. We, in fact, want to play with the limits of IT implementation.
eKapija: That brings us to the next question. Symphony has been operating for ten years now. To what extent has the company changed in the meantime, and how much has the IT industry itself changed?
– The basic values of the company are what they have always been. They remain unchanged. We are still looking to organize our activities so that people are satisfied with with them and with what they do.
Of course, it is necessary to change and adapt in the domain of knowledge, as the IT industry has greatly developed in the past decade. IT used to be an accessory and support to business, whereas today it lies in the foundation of every business and is the starting point of nearly every new project, regardless of the field.
eKapija: Does Symphony plan to develop its own products?
– This is not in our focus at the moment. Our goal is to function more as a kind of a research and development center, which will primarily work on the development of new products and software solutions in various projects, until they are ready to be launched. At that point, we let others continue to maintain them, and we turn our attention to new projects. However, in certain projects, we have established a long-term cooperation with clients due to the constant upgrading of the products we work on.
So, our focus is on constant development and technologically challenging parts of innovative projects. That's what we want to do and that's what we are very good at.
Milos Vlahovic
Ivan Dragosan, Country Director at Symphony Serbia, talks to eKapija about these projects, as well as the company's plans in the country, the opening of a new center in Novi Sad and the results made in the past year.
We also talked to Dragosan about the business philosophy of Symphony and about whether it was hard to find people capable of working with advanced technologies and new-generation programming languages in Serbia.
eKapija: You have recently celebrated a year of business activities in Serbia. How satisfied are you with what you've achieved in the past period and did you fear that you would not succeed?
– To be honest we didn't fear the lack of success as we had already had 10 years of work and experience behind us. Furthermore, we had already developed similar activities in Sarajevo, and that center is quite successful.
Symphony had very ambitious goals regarding what it wanted to achieve in Belgrade. Our idea was to build a community of 50-60 employees, which is especially important for us in order to maintain the basic values of the company and quality relations within it.
This market is full of talented people and we were entirely sure that we would succeed in finding people who meet the high criteria of both us and our clients. Now, when we have around 35 people, we still believe in this. The plan is to employ around twenty more workers, but we do not burden ourselves with deadlines and strict plans when it comes to the arrival of new people to the company.
eKapija: Tell us something more about how Symphony chooses new colleagues.
– The road traveled by Symphony in order to be able to work on the projects it works on was a thorny one. We have had enough knowledge and luck to succeed and this has enabled us to position ourselves well in the Silicon Valley market, which most of our clients come from.
The demands there are very strong and everything done gets recognized, whether good or bad, so, when you decide to expand your operations, you must make sure to maintain the quality.
Our clients expect to find in us not just coders, but also engineers capable of providing them with support in conceiving and developing an idea and in coding itself. What clients get, in cooperation with us, is quality and an engineering approach, as well as a partnership in the process from the idea to its realization.
At the same time, this means that our employees often face entirely new, unfamiliar technologies and demands.
Some candidates fail to pass the selection process not because they are bad at what they do, but because they are not trying to find out what is going on behind the surface eagerly enough, to understand the basic programming concepts. The approach of looking at the big picture enables an easy shift from one technology to another. This is the kind of people we are looking for.
Our selection process is not simple and it is not easy to satisfy our demands.
eKapija: What does this process actually look like and how hard is it to pass through it?
– Our initial step was a conventional one, placing a job ad. The response was great, as expected, but the results, regarding quality, were negligible. It simply turned out that the best experts had already been employed by good companies and that the last thing on their mind was to follow and reply to job ads.
(Symphony team in Belgrade) We performed an analysis in December 2016 and determined that fewer than 5% of those who had applied for the job had received an offer from us.
This is why we had to change the approach and we decided to identify the best candidates and try to contact them and offer them to try to pass our selection process and become members of the Symphony team.
Interestingly, the majority of them said that they were not planning to change jobs and that they were satisfied with their jobs. Nevertheless, many of those who had still come to see what kind of projects we worked on had expressed the desire to join us.
The explanation is simple. People who do a good job in the IT industry are also well paid here, but they are still looking to be challenged. They want to use new technologies and new programming languages in working on interesting projects, which is exactly what we are able to offer.
An important part of the selection process is for the candidates to spend a working day with us, to be active in practical tasks, but also to talk to their future colleagues and see whether the environment and the atmosphere here suits them.
eKapija: Symphony has also announced the opening of new development centers, in Novi Sad, Thessaloniki, Sofia and Skopje. Why these cities and how many people will be employed there?
– As we've already mentioned, we want to create hubs, small communities of experts capable of maintaining the key values and the culture of the company. That is our guiding idea.
When our employees in Belgrade and Sarajevo developed the business for around 200 new people, we decided not to expand through our existing centers, but to open new ones, although we would have been able to carry out everything much more easily and in a simpler and more cost-effective manner in Belgrade, for example.
Although this means going down a longer, more complicated and riskier road, we opted to do so, as each new center, new city and new country brings something new with it. New knowledge, new approaches and the new culture of our future employees enable us to constantly create new values.
Symphony currently has around 100 employees in San Francisco, Sarajevo and Belgrade, so it's a great challenge to increase the number of employees to that extent while maintaining the quality and the principles of our business operations. This is a big expansion, but our approach, as always, is to give ourselves time to reach the right people.
eKapija: How hard is it for companies from this region to be competitive in the global IT market?
– To our clients, who mostly come from the USA, there is not much difference between Serbia and Germany, for example. It's all Europe to them and they rarely have prejudices of any kind. What's important to them is whether the job is being done well. That's all they care for.
The achievements made are by far the most important criterion.
eKapija: What have the achievements of Symphony been? What are the most important projects you've worked on that still bring you new clients?
– The number of projects we've worked on in the past ten years is truly large.
I'd just like to note that we are especially recognized in the segment of smart glasses. These are ODG smart glasses, used, for example, in space stations by the NASA astronauts. The concept in question is the concept of augmented reality, as the glasses provide the wearer with extensive information and are a computer-based supplement which makes performing various tasks drastically easier.
Our engineers in Belgrade worked intensively on the development of the very complex software which powers these glasses. We are also working on the so-called “endless” computer, which provides access to information available on the internet only even when there is no internet connection.
The computer practically downloads the data it determines to belong to the key spheres of interest of the user in order for them to be able to continue using the data offline. Furthermore, the computer is capable of learning about the user, thereby reducing the probability of missing important data while working offline.
Here in Belgrade, we are active in a wide variety of projects. We developed smart watches for children, which enable parents to know where their children are and which can be used for emergency calls and for sending location details to pre-defined recipients. There was also a project in the field of DNA analysis, which aims to help identify potential diseases on time based on the genetic composition.
All these projects are very complex, but that's part of the challenge. We, in fact, want to play with the limits of IT implementation.
eKapija: That brings us to the next question. Symphony has been operating for ten years now. To what extent has the company changed in the meantime, and how much has the IT industry itself changed?
– The basic values of the company are what they have always been. They remain unchanged. We are still looking to organize our activities so that people are satisfied with with them and with what they do.
Of course, it is necessary to change and adapt in the domain of knowledge, as the IT industry has greatly developed in the past decade. IT used to be an accessory and support to business, whereas today it lies in the foundation of every business and is the starting point of nearly every new project, regardless of the field.
eKapija: Does Symphony plan to develop its own products?
– This is not in our focus at the moment. Our goal is to function more as a kind of a research and development center, which will primarily work on the development of new products and software solutions in various projects, until they are ready to be launched. At that point, we let others continue to maintain them, and we turn our attention to new projects. However, in certain projects, we have established a long-term cooperation with clients due to the constant upgrading of the products we work on.
So, our focus is on constant development and technologically challenging parts of innovative projects. That's what we want to do and that's what we are very good at.
Milos Vlahovic
Companies:
Symphony d.o.o. Beograd
Tags:
Symphony
Ivan Dragosan
IT industry in Serbia
Silicon Valley
endless computers
DNA analysis
smart glasses
Symphony Belgrade
Symphony Novi Sad
Symphony Sarajevo
Symphony USA
programming
coding
programming languages
Symphony development center
ODG smart glasses
augmented reality
smart watches for children
innovations
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