Top Tips for Hiring Qt Engineers

In this blog post, we will share our best practices from 15 years of experience with hiring top-level Qt engineers. And - arguably even more important - how to retain the talent and keep them happy and motivated to work in your company.

Why is the Hiring Decision so important?

We hired our first Qt engineer 15 years ago. In the meantime, about 35 more Qt engineers have joined Felgo and we learned several things in that time:

1. Employees are the backbone of success. A team of highly motivated and skilled engineers will achieve way more than bigger teams that lack the skills. We have seen this multiple times in projects we did with customers who were requesting our development services: a team of the right 5-10 skilled engineers can achieve more than 100 junior-to-medium skilled ones, as odd as this sounds.
2. Senior engineers with good people skills are a multiplicator for success as they lift up the level of your whole team.
3. Also mid-to-junior level candidates can be a great fit, especially if they have potential to grow.
4. Growing employees takes a lot of time and is a huge investment. It pays off big times, but only if you manage to keep the team members with you.

So to summarize, to have an effective team you need 2 things:

1. Senior engineers or engineers with high growth potential, and these should
2. Stay with your company for a longer time, ideally 10+ years.

Let's have a look at the first requirement:

How to Identify Engineers with High Potential

There are multiple ways to assess the potential of candidates. From technical interviews to on-site assessments, to multi-stage interview processes covering multiple aspects. In our experience, it is very hard to assess the skills of a candidate in just 1-2 hours. Even more, there are different types of personalities: especially in software engineering, a big percentage of people tends to be introverts and may be scared by job interviews where they cannot show their full potential. Similarly, engineers are often scared by just hearing about on-site assessments, because these are in an environment (like your company's location) where they do not feel familiar (yet).

These are our top 5 tips how to assess the real potential of engineers:

• Let them work on the assessment or development challenge in an environment they already know and feel comfortable with. Mostly that will be their own homes with their development PC setup exactly the way they like.
• Create an assignment that takes multiple days with a fixed deadline to complete and let the candidate choose a topic (to the biggest extent possible). What you'll learn out of that:
• Can she/he finish a task on time?
• Can she/he set realistic time estimations?
• Let them use a code repository and share that with you when submitting the application. This enables you to see their progress on the challenge over time. You will also see many more relevant things, like how the commit messages look like, if branches were used, if they spent time on commenting, and in which part of the assignment did they do that (only at the end for polishing the project, or as a constant process)?
• Add to the assignment a documentation part, like a wiki or tutorial on how other engineers can achieve the same result as they did in their project. With this information, you will see how well a candidate can share his expertise in a written form with other engineers and also how good the writing skills are.
• After you reviewed the application challenge and/or before, we advise to make a job interview to assess the personal connection you have with the candidate. You might also want to discuss the coding results and share feedback about it with the applicants, which is a fair appreciation of them taking the time to submit it.

As the main advantage, you will get a better understanding of how the candidates perform in real-world situations. In day-to-day activities, it is mostly about self planning, researching and estimating. With the presented framework above, you will get to know the actual work performance, even before you start the trial phase. This is a key advantage, because onboarding a new employee is a costly and also time-consuming process, so it is good to spend this effort only on the most promising candidates.

In Felgo, we have different kinds of “application challenges” depending on the role. They include all the criteria from above and led to a very good pre-selection of candidates with high potential and good fit with the company. You can measure this by assessing how many of the candidates you hired still are with your company after the first 12 months.

Another advantage of this approach: you will only get candidates who really want to work for you, as they spend like 20h of their time, unpaid, to work with your company!

We also apply this framework to other areas than coding, and it is applicable to other code frameworks and not just Qt!

How to make Sure Engineers Stick with Your Company for Longer Times

Finding the right people for your requirements is hard. Even harder is to make sure they stick with you, once you find them. For the second part of this article, we want to share our learnings on how to make great engineering talents stay with you long-term.

7 Top Reasons why Engineers Quit their Jobs

Based on our interviews with engineering candidates, these are the main reasons they told us:

• There is a saying that “people are not leaving a job, they are leaving a boss”. In general this can be considered as a management and communication issue.
• Change of work the employee doesn't like, like forcing them to use a technology they totally cannot identify with.
• Feel undervalued.
• No connection with colleagues and the team.
• They do not understand the meaning of doing the tasks you assign, or a missing vision by the company.
• They feel stuck and not progressing in their learning path and career advancement.
• Salary, although this was not listed as the main priority (see below).

What we found interesting is that salary is not the main factor for most candidates! If there is a great fit on many of the other aspects for example, you will have more room for salary negotiation. Additionally, if money is the main concern of candidates, they will eventually leave your company, because there will always be a company willing to pay more than what you offer at some point in the future.

So this is a battle you cannot win long-term, and better is to focus instead on building a great environment engineers will love so they stick with you as long as possible.

Here are our top 3 tips what you can do to make yourself attractive for Qt Engineers:

• Flexibility & Remote work: This is typically the biggest value for engineers. Especially after the pandemic where many have been introduced to it, many engineers like to keep working remotely. With varying degrees on how many days are preferred remotely, and some prefer to work from offices all the time. Some would like to work less hours or have some days off per week to have a better work-life balance. Some prefer to work in the early mornings, some in the evenings. In our experience, it pays off a lot to be as flexible as possible. Especially because the work hours do not necessarily correlate with the output produced. This is valid especially for a creative work like engineering which needs a fresh mind to produce the best results.
• Few meetings & asynchronous communication: Most engineers want to get things done. In our experience it is seen by many engineers as a burden to attend dozens of meetings, especially if they have little to contribute. Your development team will thank you for keeping the required meetings to attend to a minimum, and allow async communication. You can improve your engineer's efficiency by allowing them to mute notifications for a couple of hours if they are working focused on problems. This only works, if you are not micro-managing or constantly requesting them for updates of course. In Felgo, we have this defined in our company policy that it is fine to not reply instantly - if really urgent topics come up, you can still give employees a phone call if needed.
• Provide personal growth and learning path: Top-level engineers will always strive to improve themselves. If you allow them to do so, this will make sure they stay with you longer. That might be in the same engineering field, or exploring technologies that excite them. Some also want to improve in leadership or other non-tech areas, which you also should support. In Felgo, we allow engineers to grow in so-called “Power weeks”. A power week gives employees enough time to fully focus on technology or fields they are currently most interested in. As we hold these events on-site at changing locations, it also serves as a team building event with employees from multiple countries meeting each other in person and helps to build relationships.

To win the “war for talent” you need your company to stand out and make yourself attractive to top talent. The points from above will help your company to become more attractive. Essentially, you are competing with all the other companies looking for Qt engineers. In a market where the demand is growing because general Qt adoption increases and talent supply decreases because most universities do not teach much C++ any more. With Felgo for example, we have established ourselves as a global technology leader in the Qt development ecosystem by building Qt tools and building blocks that enables our mission to make Qt development easier and more efficient and focus on high quality Qt development services. This naturally attracts top talent and is in combination with the above tips our “secret sauce” to stand out and receive a good amount of Qt engineers.

We are proud that out of the ~35 Qt engineers we hired in the past 15 years, +95% are still working with us and amaze us with their skills every day. We hope you can take some of our learnings and ideas to improve your hiring process, tailor it to your company and make your engineers stay with your company long-term.