TechLead-Story: Karl Heinz Struggl, CTO at BYTEPOETS
Karl Heinz Struggl
Team
Size and Roles:
- Three development teams with approximately five to seven members each.
- Each team includes developers, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and loosely assigned UI/UX design specialists.
- Teams are cross-functional, promoting knowledge exchange and skill diversification.
Organizational Structure:
- Adopts agile development methods, aiming for self-organized teams.
- Facilitates scalability and provides an organizational framework throughout the company.
Distinctive Aspects:
- Fosters a familial and appreciative culture with open communication.
- Features a flat hierarchy, promoting a feedback-rich environment and team motivation.
Recruiting
Integration in Recruiting Process:
- Team members are consistently involved from profiling to hiring and onboarding.
- Emphasizes mandatory meetups with potential team members.
Onboarding Procedure:
- New employees receive a welcome package with state-of-the-art work tools.
- Day one includes orientation on HR topics and account setup with the Scrum Master.
- Subsequent days involve introductions, project overviews, and immediate integration into the development process.
- Newcomers are supported by experienced team members and Scrum Masters, promoting a smooth start.
Qualities Beyond Technical Skills:
- Values social competencies alongside technical skills.
- Emphasizes a good fit in terms of both technical and social aspects during hiring decisions.
Technologies
Technical Challenges:
- Diverse projects create challenges in maintaining a technological focus on tools and stacks.
Technologies in Use:
- Mobile apps predominantly developed natively for iOS (Swift) and Android (Kotlin, Java).
- Current projects involve Flutter and Dart, with previous experience in Ionic.
- Backends utilize a Spring Boot stack, often with Kotlin.
- Frontends implemented with React or Angular.
- Utilizes various SQL or NoSQL databases, Docker, and more.
Evolution of Technology:
- Language shifts from Java to Kotlin and Objective-C to Swift in mobile development.
- Increasing consideration of cross-platform technologies in the mobile domain.
- Server-side technologies evolved from PHP, Laravel, Ruby to Spring and Kotlin.