Departure lounge

Another week, another departure lounge. When I started Garlik I had hoped to be travelling less than in the past as I like being at home (hence my cunning strategy of setting up the office 10 minutes walk from where I live whilst creating a whole cover story about "attractive place to work, good links to London, close to Heathrow"). However here I am on a Sunday afternoon sitting in Gatwick departure lounge waiting for a flight to Warsaw, Poland.

Last week it was Geneva for part two of the UN Agency meetings that I am involved in. We gathered in a different conference room this time (this one had a few small windows but otherwise was identitcal to the last) and we argued for some hours about the difference between "the" and "a", and whether we were within or outside our mandate. I am sensing that my future does not lie in the world of international diplomacy.

Today I am off to Warsaw, Poland to meet with our software partner, Software Mind. At Garlik we decided from the start to adopt a mixed inhouse/outsource development model. We have a very smart core technical team of permanent employees in house and a long term (3 years nearly) partnership with our Polish software partner. That allows us to flex the team up and down as needs be whilst getting the advantage of having access to cost effective, expert software engineers close to hand. Some people worry about how adaptable you can be if you use an offshore developer and I have certainly found with other locations that you have to specify everything to infinite detail before sending it off shore for development. But we use an entirely agile approach and we have found a way of working with our partner that enables this.

I chose Poland and in particular Krakow, which is where Software Mind is based, because their Universities produce excellent mathematicians and computer scientists in quite large numbers and they work incredibly hard.

However there is a lot of competition for the good guys over there and I once asked the Director there what they do if they run out of good people to recruit. He said they have forged some relationships in the Ukraine because their Universities produce excellent mathematicians and computer scientists in quite large numbers and they work incredible hard.

I wonder what they do in the Ukraine when recruitment get tight?

Anyway, off we go again. Sounds like my plane being called....