Symphony at ITkonekt: Job Hunting to Treasure Hunting

The ITkonekt community organized the fourth annual IT week from 14-21 April in three Serbian cities: Belgrade, Nis, and Novi Sad. Besides the IT conference, which attracted some of the world’s leading experts who gave talks on hot tech topics, there was an IT job fair where visitors could learn more about various IT companies. Symphony, as gold partner to the conference, had booths in all three cities and welcomed everyone to get to know us better. 

We were glad to see so many students interested in our company and in potential employment with us: we received well over 100 job applications. While the majority of visitors were students or juniors with a computer science background, there were people of all ages who had decided to make a change in their career path. We are a company that supports personal growth and continuous learning and therefore we encourage everyone who thinks they have what it takes to apply for one of our open positions. We do not discriminate in terms of age or education background but seek smart individuals who are willing to improve themselves constantly.

Many visitors asked about our office space (the cake is a lie, but the swimming pool isn't) and future meetups. The fact that our culture driven approach resonates with so many people made us beyond happy.

Some of the most frequent questions related to the projects that we are working on and the tech stack used in these projects. This is why we had our engineers on hand to discuss any technical aspects of our work in detail: those guys are unstoppable once they get their geek on! The visitors in Nis were able to attend a talk on the cutting-edge technologies used in select projects given by our colleagues Nikola Stojanovic and Bozidar Zecevic.

In order to showcase some of the amazing stuff that we have worked on to date, we picked three products that the visitors could try out.

ODG Augmented Reality Smart Glasses are the world’s only hazardous location-certified smart glasses which can endure extreme temperatures, chemicals, and similar challenges (probably even a zombie apocalypse and any Fallout scenario). Symphony created a software platform that enables third party developers to make custom-based apps and to utilize ODG glasses in a number of ways. The most famous ODG client is NASA, who picked these AR glasses for its astronauts and future space missions.

There is a common misconception about engineers being couch potatoes that don’t see any more sunlight than your average vampire does, but at Symphony we encourage a healthy lifestyle. This includes employee perks such as the office gym and nutritious freshly cooked meals. Therefore, we are more than happy to work on a product that keeps track of your physical activity and sleep patterns. Motiv Ring is a lightweight activity tracker synced with your cell phone that measures data such as heart rate, distance, calories burned, hours of sleep, etc. When not participating in sports events, such as marathons, the Symphony team works on the app for Motiv and its website using Android, iOS, React.js, and Parse technologies.

Then we promoted Highfive, an integrated hardware and software video conferencing solution that uses simulcast to provide three different quality streams that ensure user connectivity. Some of Highfive's perks include wireless connection through all sorts of devices without a complicated installation and login procedure, and top quality hardware with HD video and 360-degree audio supported by Dolby Voice technology.

What kind of a host would we have been if we had greeted our guests empty-handed? Fortunately, there was a big stack of Symphony goodies available for visitors, and we spiced things up a little with some hidden booty. You didn't need to be Guybrush Threepwood or know R (arr, get it?) to become a pirate for a day and engage in Symphony's treasure hunt. We hid giant Symphony letters across the ITkonekt space and whoever found them and posted a pic on Instagram using #symphonygift won a gift bag and a chance to come to one of our offices for a firsthand Symphony culture experience.

We had joy, we had fun, we had coffee breaks in the sun. Freebies were handed out, knowledge was shared, applications were filled out and, hopefully, some of you will soon become our colleagues.

If you missed the chance to connect with us then you can ask anything you like at hello@symphony.is or you could look at our current job openings. Keep our busy bee HR team smiling and send us a mail today!