The global scramble for talent: software development

With the past two years being unarguably difficult for everyone, positive aspects still managed to emerge as a result.

One is that people have learnt to wash their hands, and understand being sanitary a bit better! Another is that many businesses and organisations were forcibly introduced to the concept of remote working.

The benefits of remote working within software development are legion, but many found that there was no loss in productivity with the delivery team all being remote. On the contrary, in many cases, the productivity of teams increased! The absence of commuting allows for more time to actually produce new features. Fewer distractions at home so that developers could put their heads down and really concentrate on those trickier concepts.

As with most things, there’s always a ‘BUT’ in there somewhere… and for remote development, it meant that teams were no longer constrained to the locality of the business. They could be truly remote and work in other countries. As a result, many big corporations and organisations started scouting for talent worldwide.

This led to fiercer competition for the best software developers, regardless of where they are on the globe.

It has become increasingly difficult to hire new developers at the level we, at Activate, require for our portfolio companies’ product teams. Simultaneously, we also started to lose good developers who were poached in this new round of global hiring. Such is the nature of software development teams that are in high demand.

For the last eight years, our development teams have been based in India, and from 2021 we started looking at other locations for hiring too. We searched in Bulgaria, Ukraine, only to decide on hiring developers & QA in Poland. This complemented our existing development team, and also added coverage for additional time zones that were difficult to cover solely from India.

The events in Ukraine have also created a void as huge numbers of software developers have either been drafted to fight, or had their ability to work removed.

Now we have development teams in different geographic locations bringing a vast range of talent and technical skills. Our delivery roster of fantastic people has never been stronger.

These kinds of problems are extremely tough for start-ups to deal with, on top of creating a brand new business and realising wonderful ideas into actual software products. Partnering with Activate removes these headaches as we have people with the right experience and expertise to solve these issues that can sink new businesses.

For further reading, please see the following articles that explain the current situation in more depth:

1. IT workers will be hard to find and keep in 2022 | SHRM 

2. Developers are in short supply. Here are the skills and programming languages employers need | ZDNet

3. How can companies tackle the software engineering talent shortage? | Turing

4. Javascript widens lead over other languages | Times of India

5. Is there a developer shortage? Yes, but the problem is more complicated than it looks | Forbes

If you are an early-stage startup and have questions like these, or you need help honing your business strategy or you simply want to be part of a powerful network of founders, investors and have access to product team members, apply and become an Activate Studio portfolio company here!