Goodies with a twist: how we use meetups, teaching, and creativity to motivate developers

Programmers are used to the fact that IT people have cool offices, good salaries, and a full social package. This has become the standard. We in Tensor do not stop at this, and so that the developers do not get bored, but want new ones for us, we also apply unusual methods of motivation. What – the programmers themselves will tell.

Meetups – for collecting ideas, like-minded people and money

In 2015, Oleg, a leading programmer, came to the HR director’s office. He was indignant: “Why don’t we organize meetups? I’ll even conduct it myself, just give me the go-ahead! ” The initiative is punishable: we supported Oleg and organized the first front-end development meetup in Yaroslavl.
For 5 years a lot has changed, and now our programmers have their eyes shining. Don’t feed them with bread, let them participate in meetups. In 2019, we held 5 meetups in different cities of Russia on very different topics: from mobile phones to front-end development. We simply determine the directions – what kind of specialists we lack in a particular city – we conduct meetups on such topics. People learn about us in different ways: someone saw a poster at the university, and someone saw an entry in the VKontakte IT group. So we collect everyone.
We try to make every meetup special: sometimes we do rap battles, where our guys talk about a code hotter than Oxy or Purulent, and sometimes we arrange tricks cooler than David Blaine.

Meetups are a lifestyle for me. When you explain something, you start to understand better. You also improve your communication skill – the key one for a developer. But the main thing in meetups is the opportunity to find like-minded people, to grow as a professional. In Tensor, I started with internal meetups: first I listened, then spoke with the topic of using the Nuxt.js framework. By 2019, he went to city meetups. The first was the Tyumen Tensor Forum. There I talked about the Dokku PaaS solution for developers (“Dokku or PaaS on the knee”). Cool experience, – Taranov Yuri, Leading Software Engineer

Teaching – for drive and excitement

Here, our developers demonstrate talents in 3 areas at once: the Tensor school, the department and competitions.
At TensorSchool and at the department at YARSU named after Demidov’s programmers lead pairs, work with students. Some can no longer imagine themselves without teaching.

After Tensor School, I learned to think through plans, interesting tasks and generally began to organize the work of the team differently. Is it motivating for me to organize TensorSchool? 100%! Yes, I am a programmer, a leader, but already a teacher, –Bogatyrev Mikhail, head of department in Ufa

Competition mentoring is another favorite pastime of our programmers. They start doing this for a variety of reasons.

I had three reasons to go mentoring. As a leader, I wanted to recruit a good team in Tensor, as a professional – growth, and as an ordinary mortal – passion. This year we worked with the participants of CaseCupUTMN-2020 in Tyumen. There, the guys and I wrote the code for our application for all platforms, conducted research on cross-platform frameworks and, as a result, created a finished commercial product. Our team “IMIKN SQUAD” took 1st place, – Dmitry Shevelev, head of the Tyumen branch

Creative projects – to unleash talents

Today we are no longer limited to meetups or teaching, because our employees dream of doing something special: someone wanted to become an actor, and someone wanted to become a radio presenter. And we support it! For a couple of years now we have been shooting videos about the work of services, IT and accounting, and we invite ordinary programmers to appear in them.

I was invited to participate in a video about the profession of a programmer. I fired up: I felt that I would tell people the truth. Programming is not sitting at a computer, but mathematics, perseverance. Many do not know this, go to study and waste years. So telling the truth is a good motivation. We also have a badge system: a badge is sent to your employee card for help, a completed plan or creative initiative. It is very nice! With such a system, you understand that money is far from the main thing, – Vitaly Chudakov, software engineer

And here is the video with Vitaly: