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Founded in 2017 by Antonio Šerić, Nikola Perić, and Josip Oršolić, littlecode is currently a team of 21 and is one of many tech companies in Split, as well as a long-term member of the Split Tech City community. Therefore, we thought it was a fine time to #CatchUp with them.
Here’s what they had to share!
“There are no ordinary days with us, every day brings new challenges and new learning opportunities. Our days are always dynamic and no day is the same.
However, for everyone to function, our day definitely starts with coffee first! 😀
As part of the daily routine, we can mention daily standups, afternoon coffees in nearby cafes, and some sync meetings so that we can all be up-to-date with things that are happening in the company and on projects and plan what needs to be done for that day.”
“Like every other company in the world, we struggled with the changes brought by the pandemic. Firstly, how to better manage people, teams, and projects remotely, then also how to better attract new employees and better clients, and finally how to retain our own employees at a time when there are new job offers in the market daily.
We focused on how to maintain a good team spirit within the company and – what is most important to us – how to create a good working environment for our own employees without any feeling that we are doing something forced.
We strive to constantly work on better conditions, to provide better service to our clients, but also to look at what would suit employees better, how to make their work easier and improve the working atmosphere.
The employee comes first, and, in an industry that changes as quickly as IT, you need to be agile and constantly ready for continuous changes. You need to be adaptable to trends, some of which prove to be fleeting and some of which remain forever.”
“It is interesting how our littlecode team actually grew into a group of friends who work together. The office is bursting with positive work energy, but also – when the working day is over – people get together, go for drinks, and socialize outside of working hours,…
No employer expects an employee to hang out with the team after working hours, but our team actually wants it!
In the office, employees often organize movie nights and game nights or just regular social gatherings. We also like to emphasize that we try to find and work on projects where developers have the opportunity to work with the latest technologies and on challenging enterprise solutions.”
“Commitment! The team knows that it can count on every single team member. If there is any problem with the project, the individual is not finding his or her way alone and ending up stuck – there is always someone to help.
This shows that the team spirit is at a high level and that everyone is going in the same direction. Also, the way everyone thinks about programming and loves what they do gives all of us the energy to learn and progress further.”
“Every day new obstacles appear, some we solve quickly, some more slowly. Something we are still learning to deal with is to start leaving more responsibility to our own employees.
Although they are often young people who do not have much work experience, they are all very responsible and really try to do what is best for the company and the client.
Over time, we realized that they will learn and progress much faster if we let them make decisions on their own instead of discussing and influencing all of their decisions. The way we solved it was that we left a lot of decisions to be made at the team level.”
“There were mistakes and there will be more in the future. Something that can perhaps be singled out is the faster adaptation to trends and changes in the IT industry. While in other industries you can wait to see what the competition will do and the results that a change will bring, in IT you must not be slow.
You must always try to be ahead of the curve, that’s the only way you will succeed.
It is often more important to be faster than others and learn along the way than to prepare everything for months and be late. Likewise, not every decision will have good results, but if 6 or 7 out of 10 decisions are good, it can be considered a success.”
“Maybe it’s not specific to Split, it’s actually more the case in Croatia in general – we’re talking about the amount of bureaucracy. Nobody can prepare for that.
If we look at Split alone, although the tech community in Split has grown significantly and expanded in all possible ways, everything is still predominantly oriented towards tourism and it is a general feeling that starting a company in that sector is preferred.
However, things are slowly changing and the young companies that are growing in the IT sector are showing by their example that not everyone has to turn to tourism and that other industries are also prosperous and worth investing in.
With our work, we and many others in the tech sector want to provide an example of how a young economic branch such as IT can be a pillar of the economy of Split as well as Croatia.
We also hope to show others with our work that even though we work from Croatia, we can be at the level of companies from western countries, and we believe that companies from other sectors can do it as well.”
“Make quick decisions.
In the beginning, we thought a lot about the pros and cons of every decision related to the company. Looking back, we should have made decisions much faster and learned more from mistakes.”
“We work on projects for foreign and domestic clients whose field of work is mainly related to automotive, agricultural, manufacturing, and industrial production. We are currently working on several projects, and it is difficult to single out the favorite.
All of them are challenging and interesting in their own way, and they provide a lot of space for research and programming in general.
Among the larger clients we could single out are large corporations such as BASF, Bosch, KSB, and KTM.
It is always a challenge to work on such solutions. Projects where we need to enter domain knowledge and learn, for example, which electric motors exist, are certainly interesting, to know how to design and develop an application through which the end user, without any such knowledge, will enable the configuration of the electric motor for their use in a simple way.”
“Young people who are motivated to work on themselves, progress in their career and life, and clients who want to work on new innovative solutions and new technologies.
It is a pleasure to work with a team that loves programming, that wants to learn, is not afraid of any challenge, and likes to follow the latest technologies and learn how to apply them.
We want to support them and encourage them so that with the effort they can progress quickly. It is in our interest to educate the young team and to pass on the knowledge we have acquired over the years.”
“We have several goals that we have set for ourselves this year. Like other companies, above all – grow more. But not only to attract people to increase the number. We want to attract people who fit into our team, people who are eager to learn, and who share our love for programming.
Then to work additionally on the promotion of IT in our city and the whole country.
We believe that, with the additional promotion, we can attract a larger number of people to the tech sector, which will bring benefits to all companies in the long term, and we believe to our city and country, as well.
One of our major goals is to transform into a company that can follow clients through all processes of business digitalization, but we can talk about that another time. We have a few more novelties planned for the coming months and next year, but we don’t want to reveal too much.”
“The consistency of sticking to the tech stack and programming in the technologies we know and not “playing around” with the technologies and making all sorts of mistakes.
We want to specialize and, in the foreseeable future, become a Microsoft tech stack powerhouse and employ the biggest experts in Croatia when it comes to MS technologies.”
“The local tech community supports IT companies, provides information and, through various events, enables meeting the rest of the community and promotes networking.
We cannot function without the community, one company cannot do everything alone.
However, if we all work together to promote the tech sector and the companies that work in it, we can do a lot of good. Conferences and festivals are opportunities for possible new collaborations or new jobs, and new friendships are also created, especially for people who have moved to Split from other parts of Croatia and the world.”
“Split is definitely a city with a lot of possibilities. We believe the IT industry will continue to develop and expand its operations. Even though it is difficult to predict how something will look in the future.
We are all aware that we cannot influence some obstacles, just as we could not influence the pandemic. Nonetheless, we certainly think that there is still a lot of untapped potential in our city and that an even bigger tech community will develop.
Who knows, maybe Split will be the tech capital of Europe!” 😀
“Besides our love for programming in .NET, we also love racing simulations and table football. We stand by the fact that we have the best table football players and keep the best times in Gran Turismo among all IT companies in Split. Maybe Split Tech City could organize a tournament among IT companies so you can see for yourself!” 😉
Now that’s a challenge! Well played, littlecode!
As well as giving us a challenge for the future, we’d also like to thank the littlecode team for #CatchingUp with us and wish them a lot of success in the future! 🙂
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