Working closely with your best friend - let alone starting a business together - is often seen as risky. But Future Fragment’s founders, Deon Taljaard and Stuart Jacobs, didn’t let their 23-year friendship stop them from successfully co-founding Future Fragment. As best friends and business partners, they’ve learned a lot about how to beat the myth and confidently walk the tightrope of “professional versus personal.”

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The world of tech is moving exceptionally fast. If you aren’t training your developers and your company to be ‘future-proof’, then you may be falling behind quickly. This is something that MMI Holdings’ Eugene Brockman has realised is critical to understand. In this article, he shares 5 ways in which his company strategically tries to future-proof his team.

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By Adriaan Venter

Negotiating in an interview can be hard, not to mention potentially awkward, for both parties – but this doesn’t have to be the case. When hiring, the challenge lies in striking a balance between attracting top talent for your team, and not breaking the bank. At OfferZen, we care a lot about helping companies successfully navigate these kinds of tough discussions. Here are some of the tips we think will make you feel more confident when having these conversations.

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By Sander Voorwinden

As business goes global, operating across territories and time zones, teams have become scattered by necessity; you may often find yourself in situations where developers are not physically in one location. This can be a challenge when it comes to using development frameworks that emphasise face-to-face communication, team collaboration, and planning. I’ve been working in this kind of environment for a number of years, and in this article I share some of the things I’ve learned about making distributed teams really effective.

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When it comes to hiring, there is no “one size fits all” approach, and trying to use the same approach across different contexts will risk turning a great candidate into a bad hire. Benny Ou has hired for different contexts, and has developed a set of useful questions to ask himself before he hires, in order to mould his hiring process to the specific context he’s in.

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Figuring out how to approach a conversation about a salary increase with employers can be scary, especially when you know you’ve been underpaid, because it’s hard to know where to find reliable data and how to present your case with confidence. As a Talent Advisor at OfferZen, I have seen a lot of people struggle with this, and would like to share some tips and tricks to help make this something you can handle with confidence.

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Working in the tech industry makes it easy to default to digital solutions for the systems and processes that are used on a day-to-day basis. However, these digital solutions are not always the best options to use when you are looking to promote engagement within your team. Operations Manager, Alyssa Lohmaier at WeAreMonsters shares how swapping out certain digital processes for analogue ones got her team to work better together.

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Having a team of motivated individuals with high morale will not only make working at your company more enjoyable, but also keeps everyone more resilient to burnout and stress. Jaco Prinsloo, Vice President of Custom Development at EPI-USE Labs, shares how he fosters and elevates team morale and individual purpose on a daily basis.

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No matter how many interviews you’ve been to, you probably still get nervous, and you probably still feel under-prepared. They never seem to get easier, but we also only tend to do them once in a while, which makes it hard to practice being good at them. As someone that’s been on both sides of the table, I’ve developed some useful tips over the years to help you prepare better for interviews, by focusing on what you _do_ control, making them less stressful.

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Feeling a sense of job satisfaction is incredibly important, especially for developers: If you’re happy, you’re more motivated at work, and at a lower risk of burning out. Even though a salary might contribute to your happiness, it doesn’t always help you push through grindwork, or through solving hard problems. In this article, I’ll take you through some _questions that helped me evaluate my job satisfaction_, and some tips I used to answer them.

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