Marko with our Head of People and Business Partnering Bojana Sajlovic and our Banja Luka team
How has HTEC’s expansion impacted your career? How is your average workday different nowadays? There is no such thing as an average workday at HTEC. Every day brings new opportunities and experiences, where you don’t have the time to dwell too much on past opportunities.“HTEC’s growth has accelerated mine by light years. The sheer concentration of challenges I need to tackle every day and the exposure I get by tackling them, it crams years of experience into months of real lifetime.“I’d like to elaborate on one aspect of my growth that might be relatable to fellow engineers. I started as an engineer, and I moved quickly into management, which meant that I had to let go of hands-on work in coding. Naturally, I had the same dilemma that every senior engineer I ever talked to in my life had at some point. I instinctively want to stay close to technology, and there is this fear of becoming irrelevant in the thing that employed you in the first place. I was moving so fast away from the core IT, and there were all these different thoughts in my head – what if I change my job, will I be relevant in the market, etc. At one point I realized that I had to make a decision – will I continue to put these things on my conscience and feel bad whenever I don’t code for a week or am I going to maximize this opportunity? I decided to lean into the managerial sphere and become more relevant there and use my technology foundation to help me. The moment I made that choice it all clicked in my head. I didn’t feel bad about losing touch with the latest frameworks and things like that. I can still talk to my fellow engineers about the fundamentals. I can still talk architecture, because those things don’t change every day. And I can also talk managerial and organizational business with more of my colleagues in the company and bring more value to the company that way. So, you don’t become irrelevant, you just evolve. Can you highlight one challenge and one positive outcome arising from HTEC’s expansion? The biggest challenge is getting the right people on the bus fast enough so we can keep up with the pace of new exciting projects we get to work on. We want to find those people fast. When we identify them, we want to bring them on board quickly and efficiently, while maintaining our culture and values. One cool outcome of our growth is this right here – someone putting us together and organizing the interview, you and I talking, someone posting this on the website and social media. Our growth is not only creating new opportunities for engineers, but for a whole plethora of other talents as well. We are contributing to the communities that we operate in, and that’s the coolest thing for me. We are seeing the change in our environment, we are being the change in the environment wherever we are. What would be your message to someone reassessing their career and considering HTEC? My message would be to read my answer to the first question, just to understand how ambitious we are. And if that doesn’t scare you, and if you’re still considering us, then be ready to think on your feet, to innovate and figure things out with us. We are perfectly aware that we don’t have all the answers, but we do care about our people, we do care about our customers, we do maximize every opportunity and, as part of HTEC, you should too.
