“Training is a worthwhile investment! There is a lot of untapped potentials, hidden in the inexperienced but hungry for development people,” shared our partners from
Tick42.
For them, the investment in master junior talent is an essential part of their growth, and we are happy that they recognize Telerik Academy as “the most reliable and successful source for finding well-prepared junior specialists.“
To learn more about the company, its culture, goals, and future plans, we talked with Leslie Spiro, CEO and Co-founder (on the photo bellow); Stoyan Damov, Co-CTO and Co-founder; and Susan Walters, Head of Professional Services.
Meet Tick42, а software product and services business company
The company was established more than 10 years ago, in 2010, and is rapidly growing ever since. It is a privately owned company founded by the UK-based CEO, Leslie Spiro, and the two Bulgarian CTOs - Stoyan Damov and Lubo Konstantinov. The three of them have worked together even before establishing Tick42.
Currently, the Tick42’s team amounts to around 110 people across the headquarter in Sofia and the representatives in London and New York. But the main part of it (more than 85 people) is based here, in Sofia, Bulgaria, working from the company’s office in
Campus X, or remotely from other cities.
“Our Professional Services business offers custom software development and consultancy services to a range of clients from large enterprises to start-ups who need help to develop their product,” shared the Tick42 team, adding “we are problem-solvers, working in a place with an emphasis on understanding the client Use Case and pain points to deliver solutions that work.”
Tick42 provides a variety of operating models for their clients, including dedicated remote project teams with management, custom business app/system development, redevelopment of legacy software to modernize the tech stack and UX.
“In some cases, the software we build will be part of our client’s digital transformation initiative and will be deployed to a platform, underpinned by our flagship product
Glue42.”
Glue42 is Tick42’s primary product line. It’s a desktop integration platform, first released in 2014, and since then has been deployed into production environments of world-renown (investment) banks, asset management firms.
In 2017, Version 2.0 was
awarded as "Technology Project" of the year by The Banker. The latest version (3.0), released in 2018, is set to be deployed across 25,000+ desktops in the world.
“With our product, we are constantly pushing the envelope of Desktop Automation. In 2020, we expanded into new markets, released a market-leading open-source platform (Glue42 Core), and launched Glue42 Appliances – pre-configured packages designed for rapid implementation and even faster return on investment,” explained Susan Walters, Head of Professional Services (on the photo).
Apart from its product line, Tick42 also develops custom solutions for their clients, based on a range of technologies - JavaScript/TypeScript-React, Angular, Electron, Java (Spring boot), .Net - C#, Net Core, .Net Standard, WPF, WinForms, Blazer, Clojure and Python.
The role of the junior talent
Tick42’s mission goes beyond building a world-class, profitable software business - a big part of it is to offer an environment, which is challenging and fun to work in, and “allows the staff to develop on the career path their interests take them.”
Also, to keep growing, you need the right talent.
“What we have learned is that the junior talent is an asset because they do not have ingrained habits and ways of developing software, and they adapt better to our company’s style. We find it as a plus when a developer enters a company culture with a blank slate as to how things are done.”
Another key benefit of hiring junior tech talent is their loyalty. Because they appreciate the chance, the time and the attention invested in them, their enthusiasm about how the company succeeds in time is incredible, shares the Tick42 team.
“Without today’s junior developers, we cannot have tomorrow’s senior developers.”
The partnership with Telerik Academy
“For us, Telerik Academy is the most reliable and successful source for finding well-prepared junior specialists. We have a proven partnership since 2017!”
According to Tick42, Telerik Academy produces “outstanding talents“ who help them enrich their human capital, making the Academy a “leader in tech education in Bulgaria."
“We trust Telerik Academy because the curriculums give the graduates consistently grounding technical knowledge, deep understanding, and strong discipline for а limited time, which makes Telerik Academy extremely competitive with the training mechanism of the universities,” shared the Tick42 team, adding that the training programs are designed to match the needs of employers thanks to the constant collaboration between both parties.
Bogomil is one of the many Telerik Academy students who now work at Tick 42
For us, at Telerik Academy, it is vital to understand the needs of the IT sector. That’s why we have a constant and open communication with the business, listening to all companies that are part of this ecosystem and our students.
This is something that our partners highly value.
“The syllabuses are better and more relevant every year because the Academy offers great flexibility for its partners - it welcomes their voice, their ideas for improvements and customizations, and strives for adapting its technical education services to the needs of the present business and corporate world.”
Trends, shaping the IT sector
One question that we are always eager to ask our partners is about the trends that shape their area of work at the moment.
Well, Tick42 caught us by surprise - “Full stack developers!”. Wait, how is this a trend? It is a fascinating perspective.
“We find there is a lot of time spent looking for full stack developers across the industry,” shared from the company. “Our developers are experts in either back-end or front-end technologies - we do not tend to have full stack developers per se.”
It’s an interesting strategy that bucks the current trends, but for Tick42, this is a strategic difference that lets the developers to be experts in their respective fields. Also, there is one additional benefit from this - it helps communication when working in teams as they must talk to each other to realize the end-to-end vision, explained our interlocutors.
Stoyan Damov (on the photo bellow), Tick42 co-CTO, even adds that being a full stack developer is akin to being a guinea pig - neither Guinean nor a pig. One of the company’s values is “Keep Learning.“
That’s why the company needs to find people who genuinely love to think outside the box and keep learning to continue to be relevant and contribute to solving clients’ problems in the slickest way possible.
What's next for Tick42? Here's the answer
“The future for us is to continue developing Glue42 and to become the world leader in UI Application Integration and therefore seeing Glue42 adopted by more medium and large enterprises, which use it as the basis for their in-house application development and delivery platforms.
At the same time, we must continue the growth of our professional services business, where clients continue to work with Tick42 as a hyper reliable partner, who can deliver excellent applications to demanding time scales, even when the project is not well-specified, and/or the requirements change as the project progresses.
To support this growth, the challenge for Tick42 is to provide an environment that people want to join and that supports their development and growth in ways that make sense for them and our business. This can include career paths that allow progress without requiring management, as well as offering the chance to alternate between pure technical roles and roles including people management responsibility.”
Are you looking to jumpstart your career in IT? Find out more about our T
elerik Academy Alpha programs. Are you a company seeking Master Junior talent? Then go through our
business page or
contact us directly.
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