Remote working in pandemic times is encouraged, as it is a solution for flattening the coronavirus curve, as well as protecting our most vulnerable peers.

We, at VON Consulting, are an IT recruitment agency operating in 3 cities in Romania, as well as in Germany and the United States, and we’ve encouraged remote working for its fair share of benefits.

Remote working in pandemic times – pros and cons

What is the first benefit that we’ve identified? Working from home these days saves time and money on commutes.
Another benefit? For some of our tech talent and team members, remote working led to a better work-life balance.

On the other hand, for some of our colleagues remote working blurred the lines between workspace and home space.
Not being in the office with the team caused a feeling of less engagement and connectivity for other colleagues.

Your company might at some point experience the upside, as well as downside to remote working.

In order not to affect productivity and performance, remote working needs to go hand in hand with employee engagement.
And for the latter, we have some tips & tricks, which we believe you’ll find useful.

Tips for improving employee engagement when remote working in pandemic times

Step 1: Measure what you want to accomplish in accordance with your team

Engagement can mean different things to different people. Things going on at their home differently distract every employee – be it kids, chores, housemates or roommates, social media, radio, TV, etcetera. So the best way we, as a recruitment agency, recommend to gauge employees’ engagement levels is by simply asking them about their work and their passion levels. Obviously, at the same time, as an employer you should monitor progress on assignments. Also, you should confront any concerns you might have about a team member’s performance.

Step 2: Make e-meetings a place for casual hangouts as well

During the working day we’re sure you keep in touch through video calls, instant messaging, e-mail and web conferencing platforms. It’s also important to plan out virtual get-togethers for non-work-related chats. The idea is to let off the steam of tense work-related conversations. Try coffee e-meetings at least once a week; also, engage your employees by also encouraging them to propose other types of informal virtual meets. Who knows, maybe celebrity trivia night will become a regular calendar fix-up after all.

Take also into account to…

Step 3: Leave your virtual door open

Appreciation should go beyond borders – and it often doesn’t need grand gestures. Is it someone’s birthday? Send them a virtual gift card. Did a team member go above and beyond on an assignment? Schedule a team call to recognize their efforts. Moreover, team leaders should make sure to leave their (virtual) door always open. Miscommunications are common between remote working teams. The last thing you want is for your employees to feel like they can’t talk to their supervisors, ask questions or voice concerns. Encourage one-to-one meetings as well, try to listen and voice solutions rather than concerns or critiques.

Step 4: Foster individual connections, not one-size-fits-all communication

It’s totally understandable why managers and team leaders would want to keep things professional. However the work from home landscape can be tricky. Keep in mind that team members are still human. They have loved ones, celebrations and bad days like everyone else. As an employer, you need to recognize their strengths, weaknesses and interests to better connect with them. Sending information based on the circumstances of the individual is a better way to get a person’s attention.

Step 5: A competitive team that works together stays together

Have you heard of gamification? It’s actually the practice in which game-playing elements are introduced in nongame environments. More and more companies have resorted to this tactic to encourage customer loyalty and engagement.
Team-based goals and competitions enhance collaboration and cooperation, as members strive towards a common objective.
What’s more, game-based performance management systems can also help standardize performance metrics and evaluation criteria.

So, to sum up, with the right attitude, empathy and a team-centric approach, remote working doesn’t need to be a hurdle. Remote working can act as a catalyst, if handled in accordance with your team’s needs.

Graph databases store information as nodes and data specifying their relationships with other nodes. They are architectures for storing data with complex relationships.

They have been substantially used, especially during the past decade, despite the fact that companies have considered other NoSQL and big data technologies.

The global graph database market was estimated at $651 million in 2018 and is expected to grow to $3.73 billion by 2026.

Competitors remain in the range of other big data management technologies, including Hadoop and Spark.

Graph databases and query languages

Developers think in objects and use hierarchical data representations in XML and JSON regularly.

For graph databases, although it may be relatively easy to comprehend the modeling of nodes and relationships used, querying them requires learning new practices and skills.

Developers can query Neo4j graph databases using Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Gremlin, but 90% prefer to use Cypher.

The query is elegant and efficient but has a learning curve for those used to writing SQL queries. Here’s one of the first challenges for organizations moving toward graph databases: SQL is a pervasive skill set, and Cypher and other graph query languages are a new skill to learn.

These databases can be used in flexible hierarchy design

Product catalogs, content management systems, project management applications, ERPs and CRMs all use hierarchies to categorize and tag information. Graph databases enable arbitrary hierarchies. Developers need to create different views of the hierarchy for different needs.

To take advantage of flexible hierarchies, it helps to design applications from the ground up with a graph database. The entire application is then designed based on querying the graph and leveraging the nodes, relationships, labels, and properties of the graph.

Databases and cloud deployment – reduced operational complexity

Deploying data management solutions into a data center has to consider infrastructure and operations, security requirements and review performance considerations. These are used to size up servers, storage, and networks. They are also used as replicated systems for redundancy and disaster recovery.

Organizations experimenting with graph databases now have several cloud options. Engineers can deploy Neo4j to GCP, AWS, Azure, or leverage Neo4j’s Aura, a database as a service.

The public cloud vendors have graph database capabilities. These include AWS Neptune, the Gremlin API in Azure’s CosmoDB, the open source JanusGraph on GCP, or the graph features in Oracle’s Cloud Database Services.

According to an article published by www.developer-tech.com, the most notable surge in 2020 – where demand for software engineers in the US is concerned – is for AR/VR talent. It scored a whopping 1400% increase in comparison to 2019. The article cites a study made by career website Hired.
The explanation is very simple: as per IDC predictions, the AR/VR market and subsequent need for skilled software engineers was enjoying about 60% of the total spending on software solutions in 2018. Forecasters say that it will reach 85% by the end of 2021. Retail, transportation, manufacturing and public sectors will be needing services from these software engineers on the top of the chart.

AR/VR and why it’s so in demand in the United States

North America is the region that invested heavily in the AR/VR market in the past 12 months. It is forecast to witness the fastest growth in the next 5 years.

The salaries for AR/VR software engineers jobs range from $135k – $150k in major US tech hubs. 46% of software engineers, as developers, would like to learn AR/VR, one of the top 3 emerging technologies.

Gaming and computer vision engineers come in 2nd and 3rd

After VR/AR, the second biggest growth of in-demand talent was seen for ‘gaming engineers’ and ‘computer vision engineer’ roles – both witnessing 146% growths over 2019.
Demand for ‘search engineers’ increased 137%, whereas for ‘machine learning engineers’ increased 89%. Blockchain talent is still in demand, shy off 2019, with a 9% increase.

Most in demand programming languages

The study shows that some of the most in-demand programming languages are Go, Scala, Ruby, TypeScript, Kotlin and Objective C. Also in-demand are JavaScript, Swift, PHP, Java, HTML, and then Python.
Some of the less in-demand languages are, unsurprisingly, some of developers’ favourites. Python, JavaScript, and Java are developers’ favourite languages but are behind several other – including three of developers’ least favourites (Ruby, PHP, and Objective-C).

DevOps satisfaction increases productivity and product deployment. It’s all-official and on the record, according to a study cited by www.developer-tech.com. So if you’re a company operating in software providence services and have a DevOps team in place, you might find the following study useful. It is useful not only for personnel recruiting, but also for personnel satisfaction and workflow efficiency.

There’s a clear connection between DevOps and developer job satisfaction. According to findings, published in April this year, developers working within mature DevOps practices are 1.5 times more likely to enjoy their work and 1.6 times more willing to recommend their employer to prospects.

Mature practices boost code deployment in 2020, as compared to 2019

The study cited by the afore mentioned website reveals that development velocity within DevOps teams is quickly gaining momentum. 55% of respondents deploy code to production once every week at a minimum – a 3% surge to last year’s standings. Operations velocity also increased as compared to 2019.
The major differences in investment priorities between mature and immature solutions can be found across Container Security. Mature practices are investing 2.2 times more than immature practices.

Security applications: there’s room for improvement

There is one other interesting finding brought out by the study. 47% of developers acknowledged that they didn’t invest in security despite its importance.
The study also shows DevOps teams would rather invest in automated security tools, including open source governance (44%), web application firewalls (59%), and intrusion detection (42%).

When it comes to recruiting, half of professionals in the U.S. are now changing their in-person meetings to either phone or video, for health and safety reasons. And Europe makes no exception; so new times call for new ways to handle such experiences.

There is no doubt about it: in Covid-19 challenged times the way we conduct our professional lives is changing.

As a candidate, you need to know that the questions and conversations are likely to be the same as they would have been in a live one-to-one interview. But an offline interview conducted face-to-face has some differences as against one through a digital screen.

If you’re in the process of getting ready for a job recruiting interview on video, these examples of what NOT to do ahead of and during a video interview for a new job should be best practices to get you set up for success.

Internet connection – don’t leave it to chance

Check your internet connection speed to help ensure your video will come across smoothly – particularly in the room in which you want to be at the time of the recruiting interview. Don’t leave your familiarization with virtual meeting tools up to the time of the interview. You can also download the software used, like Microsoft Teams and Google Hangouts, which are currently being made available for free test runs. Have the virtual meeting tool available both on your laptop, as well as on your smartphone.
Don’t leave it up to the interviewer to remind you to share cellphone numbers – just in case you need to conduct the interview (or parts of it) over the phone.

The space around you 

We recommend you have the interview at home – a quiet, well-lit space with a neutral background is ideal. Despite it being your personal space, choose not to clutter it with home interior accessories, photos of your loved ones or any other type of memorabilia.
Also try to keep pets and family members in another room during the interview.
Make sure you aren’t distracted by your phone and computer notifications (yet there’s the upside that you can have some notes on hand to highlight that you’re the right candidate for the job).

Your attire – don’t get too comfy

Even if it’s a virtual meeting, it’s important to dress as you would if you were going to the interview in person.
Do not use bright colors in your attire and also avoid large pieces of jewelry or statement accessories, other than the necessary headphones.
Also, don’t rely on the fact that your bottom half will not show: make sure your bottom half matches your upper half, in case you need to get out of your seat for any reason.

Don’t dive in the virtual recruiting interview pool without a small practice

Virtual interviews have their challenges. One of the biggest is the conversation flow, which may at times become robotic.
Try to be calm and patient. Pitch in to the conversation with something you have read or documented about the company you are considering joining.
Adjust your body language and don’t sulk (adjust your posture and sit upright, without seeming stiff). Don’t be irritated if the recruiter is taking longer to respond.
Remember that there is a two-way street to the video interview game and that the recruiter is also human 🙂 Loosen the connection with the interviewer and show that you are a team player, capable to adapt to diverse situations.
Have a practice run ahead of the actual interview, as this might prove to be your winning ticket to a new job.

Also take into consideration, ahead of the interview to:

Good luck!

Artificial Intelligence – it goes by many names and it’s definitely here to stay. Whether we call it machine learning, machine intelligence, thinking machine, electronic brain, Artificial Intelligence impacts technology trends and how companies relate to it.

Machine learning is changing companies’ DNA

Over the past 2 years, in particular, there has been a flurry of activity in this respect. Companies have been born carrying the Artificial Intelligence DNA exclusively.

It all makes sense: machine learning is a powerful tool with tremendous potential. It encompasses a staggering range of applications. Off the top of our head, here’s a few: recommendation search engines, fraud identification, detecting and predicting machine failure, optimizing options-trading strategies, diagnosing health conditions, speech recognition and translation, enabling conversations with chatbots, image recognition and classification, spam detection. Basically it can predict everything. From how likely someone is to click on an advertisement, through to how many new patients a hospital will admit.

Therefore at VON Consulting we have a deep interest in how technology impacts software and hardware applications and how it will continue to do so in the future, in particular through our Tech Division. Our team of professionals is able to advise our clients, prior to incorporating new technologies in their business plan, with a healthy validity assessment.

The validity-assessing scheme we propose in AI integration

Step 1: Identifying the problem/opportunity
We recommend you always start with the problem statement. What does your company say it’s trying to do, and is it worthy of machine learning? And how can AI become an opportunity in this framework?

Step 2: Approaching the problem/opportunity
This is where we want to figure out how your company has reframed its problem statement into a machine-learning problem, and determine what data it would need to input into its algorithms.

Step 3: Sourcing training data
Once we know the kind of data your company needs, we want to know how you should go about acquiring it. Most AI applications use supervised machine learning, which requires clean, high-quality labeled data. Who is labeling the data? And if the labels capture something subjective like emotions, do they follow a scientific standard? Knowing the details of this part of the pipeline also helps you identify any potential sources of data collection or labeling bias.

Step 4: Auditing products
Now we should examine whether your company tests its products. How accurate are your algorithms? Are they audited for bias? How often does it reevaluate its algorithms to make sure they’re still performing up to par? If your company doesn’t yet have algorithms that reach its desired accuracy or fairness, what plans does it have to make sure it will, before deployment?

Step 5: Decision call
In this particular step, you should consider the benefits of having this technology available. Also, if they outweigh the potential human rights violations of emotional surveillance. One more question needs to be asked: does your company have mechanisms in place to mitigate any possible negative impacts?

What to do, as a company?

As such, we advise any company with a quality machine-learning product to check off all the boxes above. Basically, it should be tackling a problem fit for machine learning and have robust data acquisition and auditing processes. Also, to have highly accurate algorithms or a plan to improve them and be grappling head-on with ethical questions.
Our team is here to assist you with this evaluation process as well as hands on technology integration, product development and launches.

For all of its potential to increase efficiency, working-from-home also presents unique challenges.
One of the main advantages of working-from-home is that it eliminates certain distractions, however it also opens the door to new ones, temptations to do non-work related things.
One other important aspect to consider is that the home environment itself can be a challenge if it’s not suitable for working. Whereas office buildings are generally designed to enhance productivity, such as with adequate lighting and space, your home probably wasn’t.

With that in mind, we’ve put together a short list of tips that might help you overcome potential hurdles (they helped our team).

Choose the right working space

Setup, setup, setup! It’s a good idea to have a space at home that’s dedicated to work, whether it’s a dedicated room or a defined space, where you can run both a laptop and desktop, if need be, within reach of some ‘perks’, such as your coffee machine (this is how you prevent a coffee making trip from turning into an hour’s time waster). Choose a space that’s airy, spacious enough and comfortable.

Focus on having a working routine

It sounds great; the idea that you can have the liberty to adjust your working schedule. It also may prove to be tricky, as you can end up either burning the candle at both ends, or reduce your productivity. Try to divide your most productive time frames, if your company allows it – for instance, early morning (7-11 a.m.) and then again in the early evening (3-7 p.m). Having a routine lets you focus on work and schedule other stuff in the time you have spare.

Try to allot daily time to offline activities

It can be very easy when you work from home to end up glued to your chair, for work-related, as well as personal tasks. That’s not good for your health or your productivity. Make sure that you build in time to exercise (at least take a walk) and get out of your workspace. Working from home should not mean working round the clock any more than it should mean never working at all.

Don’t disregard healthy eating habits

Sitting on your backside all day at home is fraught with risk anyway. So don’t push yourself any further over the edge by living on a diet of fast food and soft drinks. Granted, we know, this is easier said than done. It’s hard to resist the occasional splurge. It’s still a hard cold fact: the more junk you eat, the harder it is to find any motivation to get stuff finished.

Avoid blurry traps that get you out of the workflow mindset

Whilst you may occasionally prefer to dress down when working-from-home, try to get dressed for it, once in a while. Why? The act of getting dressed is something that you take on in work-from-office life. It reminds you that you are going to work and not just sitting in front of the computer all day. It also prevents you from accidentally surprising colleagues and clients when you answer a video call.