Anton Cherniaev

How did you start your career at Altenar? Why did you decide to join the team?

Until 2022, I worked as a team lead at a relatively small company in Perm. In 2022, I joined Altenar as a fully remote .NET developer. At the time, I wasn’t looking for a team lead role on a distributed remote team. I wanted to get back to hands-on work for a while.

However, the project grew quickly, and by mid-2023 we needed team leads for new teams. So things came full circle.

How do you hire people for your team? What matters most to you when deciding whether to bring a candidate on board?

We have two interviews, where we assess both candidates’ technical skills and their soft skills: their motivation, how well they can talk about themselves and their experience, and how they relate to the things and values that matter to us.

For me personally, the deciding factor has always been a candidate’s soft skills combined with an acceptable level of hard skills, never the other way around. I’m convinced that if a person is motivated, wants to grow and is capable of it, responds well to feedback and actually listens to it, and is simply easy to talk to, then it will be easy and enjoyable to teach that developer the hard skills they need.

It works worse the other way around, or doesn’t work at all. A candidate with weak soft skills will be a challenge for me and for the team, and that’s hard to change.

What principles guide your work and communication with the team?

As a team, we value openness, honesty, accountability, and all those other big words that describe constructive, healthy communication.

Team agreements are important to us. If we’ve agreed on something, we stick to it. At the same time, there’s always room to renegotiate if someone on the team brings it up for discussion. Then we reach a new agreement, and we stick to that one.