Month: December 2016

Technology

Should We Leave Spanish Behind In The Tech Community?

Dec 12, 2016 by Itnig Startup Ecosystem 1 Comments

World Economic Forum recently published an article that Lisbon was aimingat becoming the next unexpected tech hub in Europe, just like Ireland has become the last decade.

Lisbon is a great city with an increasing number of tech startups, now hosting the Web Summit, and the government recently made an investment fund of 200 million for early growth companies. All of this is great, but they’re missing something Ireland had all along. English.

Barcelona is way ahead of Lisbon in becoming the leading European tech hub along the Mediterranean. We’re talking in amount of VC’s, accumulated investment, amount of startups, accelerators, incubators, I could go on for a while.

But like up and coming Lisbon, Barcelona is also missing one vital element.

  • English.

Boosting the expat community

It’s not that people in Barcelona in general are lacking English skills. As a person that’s learning Spanish, I think people’s skills generally are too good, it makes me learn the local language much slower.

It’s more about the willingness to adopt all the great activity in the tech ecosystem from Spanish to English.

There’s too many interesting events and meetups around Barcelona that are done in Spanish. And there’s too many expats, digital nomads and visitors that aren’t able to attend.

The more active people, the stronger an ecosystem is, and if we want Spain and Barcelona to grow one of the strongest communities in Europe, we need everyone we can get our hands on.

Barcelona is already attracting a lot of talent from abroad, but I’m sure more people would set up shop if they knew they could survive with only English, everything to make the transition easier.

An old man’s problem

Before writing this article I talked with many local entrepreneurs and developers in Barcelona. I was a bit hesitant to ask them the question, I don’t want to come as a guest, asking them to abandon their language.

But everybody I talked to agreed. Spanish is great, but the tech community would benefit from being solely in English.

The people I spoke to were young people, and I think I would get another answer from some of the older generations of entrepreneurs, which unfortunately is where the power often lies as well.

At itnig we’re many Spanish people, and the lunch chat is usually conducted in Spanish. But all of our events, media and content are in English, and all of our employees can at any time switch over to English.

That’s why many of our recent hires has been people from outside Spain: Lithuania, England, Germany, Italy, Norway, etc.

Far from a Spanish thing

Before writing this post, I was aware that this is a topic you either agree or disagree with. You hate it or like it.

Either way, I think it’s important to know that this is not a Spanish challenge (if it is a challenge at all), it’s a concern all entrepreneurs living outside an english speaking country should address, at least consider.

Both Berlin and Paris are thriving startup hubs in Europe, and their tech communities are growing rapidly, despite German and French being the main language. But Barcelona (and many other cities) doesn’t have the privilege of being financial and economic centers in Europe, and to speed up the development of the current ecosystem, a common language might be helpful.

According to EDCi (European Digital City Index) Stockholm and Copenhagen ranks as the 2nd & 7th best cities on the continent.

If you research some of their biggest startup communities like #CPHFTW in Copenhagen, or SUP46 in Stockholm, they’re all communicating in English, making it super easy for all kinds of people to join in.

Amsterdam and Helsinki are the 3rd and 4th countries on ranking. All of these countries are known for good english skills, the EDCi even lists it as a criteria for ranking so high.

Small, but necessary step

Many would probably argue that there’s other more important things to change or improve to boost Spain and Barcelona as a tech friendly environment, than increasing English as a working language.

  • Friendlier tax regulations would certainly help.
  • More access to venture capital would be fantastic.
  • And for more established tech companies relocating to the city could also be great.

My idle theory is that a broader use of English could make all of the above happen faster.

Huge tech companies would be more likely to relocate if they knew they could operate in English.

This again would stimulate the ecosystem, and more VC’s would open their eyes to Spain, and know that they could operate deep in the community without worrying about language.

And in the end, if key tech players together with an increasing amount of VC’s establish themselves in the country, the authorities would eventually follow and adapt.

A Spanish ecosystem where English is the main community language wouldn’t fix everything, it’s always a work in progress, but it’s about putting up the right domino so all the others follow.

Do you have NO national pride??

Please, I understand that you’re proud of the Spanish and Catalan languages, they are beautiful, complex and huge – bigger than English.

If Spanish was the spoken language by Silicon Valley companies, and most tech hubs around the world, my argument would be different, but right now all are more or less done in English.

I would never want anyone to stop speaking Spanish to their friends and family. Like I’ll never stop speaking Norwegian with my friends.

But it’s about breaking down barriers for business, including people in the ecosystem and making it easier for both tech giants and small startups to relocate to beautiful Spain.

I think it’s a matter of time, but why not speed it up?

Technology

Why you should aim UX/UI design at zombies

Dec 12, 2016 by Itnig Startup Ecosystem 0 Comments

I’m faced with a design challenge everyday. Sweet! I like it. It’s fun and rewarding to find a solution, if that’s your thing. Like working on a puzzle: finding all the pieces, recognizing what’s their right position, joining them one by one, and finalizing with a composition that only makes sense when everything is together.

That being said, the pieces of the puzzle don’t have a clear shape or color, and a lot is left to analysis, and interpretation. And you don’t even have a reference of how the puzzle is supposed to look like.

Probably is not like putting a puzzle together at all. Whatever. Never mind.

Zie zombies

And who is the target? Who is going to end up looking at that puzzle — or whatever that is — that a UXUI Designer put together? You are. We are. The idle minded. Because that’s what we — the users — are in the end. Our brains are too busy thinking on what we’re going to have for dinner, where, with who, or if we will have take away on our own again. So when we grab the phone, open the browser, grab the TV remote, we’re not actively thinking. Content. That’s what we want.

When I first heard about this, the fact that users don’t think, I felt disappointed on human intelligence. But after all, one of the must-read books for product designers is called “Don’t make me think”. Like it or not. We are contributing to feed a whole generation of Zombies. Users are zombies.

If you think about it, makes a lot of sense.

They move in big groups, without a clear objective, relying on automatisms and muscular memory, reacting slowly, and paying little or no attention to their surroundings.

Full attention, not necessary

Now, I am not saying that people are zombies. My point is that users are multitasking most of the time they spend in front of their devices. We eat sandwiches, drink coffee, walk around the city, talk to our friends, and listen to music. We even dare to think of more important stuff! Because using an app shouldn’t be cumbersome. After all it’s just a tool. The meanings to an end. And although some tools are far more complicated than others, once we learn to use them we don’t actively read any buttons or labels anymore. We knowwhere everything is. And when something changes we hate it, because it makes us think and reroute our wirings.

When I started designing websites, which would lead to designing software and interfaces, nobody told me psychology would play such a big role. Yet, we don’t get to play with full functioning brains most of the time, we have to make what we can out of 20% of the user’s attention — Yes, I made that number up.

Your users won’t be reading half of the labels, nor what the buttons say. They will type in what they consider that should be typed in, wherever they consider its supposed to be. And they will click that big chunk of color that looks like a button, and will always click and tap on the image, not the text. To make that easy, the design has to avoid possible distractions.

In order to make a user interface work, we have to strip it out of all the unnecessary. Here’s an example.

Keeping it simple, visually

A while ago, I work on a project at Asana. We called it Typography Update. During the redesign many hands touched the interface, and many engineers worked on the CSS. The result was great. But part of the collateral damage of having so many moving parts were little mismatches on font sizes, colors, and spacing.

So I went on and reduced the number of styles, fixed inconsistencies, and adjusted the margins. I reduced and standardize the body size, the paragraphs, and their line-height. Headings had the same exact style now, in a couple of different sizes for hierarchy. Project names became tokens almost everywhere. Margins became consistent around the objects, and relative to object their size. And different shades of gray for copy were reduced to only two, based on the contrast ratio with the background.

When I showed the first results to the product manager she couldn’t see the actual changes. She asked “How did you do that? You didn’t change anything and it looks way better!”. The multiple styles and little inconsistencies had been adding noise and clutter. Imperceptible. Little by little. Too many instruments going for a solo at the same time. We were making the brain work overtime, and forcing it to think. Not a lot. But more than what was necessary.

The voices in our heads

Why was this design more effective and harmonious?

Each different style is a new voice you add to the chorus that is the interface. Restricting the number of those will make things easier to process for the user, since they won’t have to register yet another voice in their head. A bunch of small disruptions will cause havoc in their visual field. But restrict it too much, and all the voices will be the same.

My advice then? When adding styles, make them dramatically different. Go from 10 to 14, from blue to black, from regular to bold. It either is really different, or it’s the same. Because zombies can tell a human from a deer apart. But all human are the same to them: just food.

We are idle minded, our list of priorities is to get what we want, not to understand how we are getting it. We are — and want to keep being — idle minded.

So when building a tool, design something that a zombie could use. That is good product design.

Startups

How I Got Hired & Ditched By UBER

Dec 4, 2016 by Itnig Startup Ecosystem 0 Comments , , , ,
This is not a picture of me.

There is a lack of engineers everywhere, but finding talent is especially hard in the Bay Area.

I’m from Spain but 5 years ago I went three months to SF, to attend a couple of conferences and visited some friends.
At that time I was trying to start something, but I changed my mind and I started looking for jobs in the US instead.

Getting in contact

Every single company I visited was recruiting.

Tech companies provided pizza, beers and tons of famous, smart people to talk about smart things. All to attract talent.

I sent out many resumes, but 90% of the times I didn’t receive any response, and I couldn’t figure out what was missing.

I have a CS degree, five years of experience and lots of open source contributions in cutting edge technologies. My best guess was that US companies were not willing to sponsor me a `H-1B` visa.

I was close to giving up and going back to Spain when I received two calls from a couple of companies. One of them was Klout, the social media analytics company that sold for $200 million. The second call was from a company that was just starting up at the time, they wanted to disrupt the transportation industry.

The interviews

The first interviews are always done by telephone. They ask you about your background, some theoretical questions and some *puzzles*.

When they have decided that you’re smart enough to meet face to face, the real interview starts, and it’s not a normal meet and greet, it can last up to three hours.

You talk with people from different departments, answer more questions and solve more *puzzles* on whiteboards.

– Implement a function that calculates square roots
 — Sort and concat arrays in a optimal way
 — Guess the two missing numbers in a array with `n — 2` length containing `1..n` unsorted numbers
 — Calculate the number of digits for a given number
 — Implement a function to detect palindromes
 — …

Most of them were doable, but I think they were missing some amazing developers that may not know how to solve those problems,
but they are capable of solving real-life problems (fix this bug, port this library, refactor this code…).

Some of the theoretical questions I had (mostly javascript related):

– What is a closure and which disadvantages does it have:
 — What is hoisting.
 — How does `this` work.
 — How `float` works and which issues does it have.
 — How does the event loop work on the browser and how to delay a function to the next tick.
 — How to optimize CSS, and how does specificity work.

The offers

Both companies I interviewed for offered to sponsor me a H-1B visa and a good salary.


I ended up accepting one of the offers because they where more transparent with the stock options (which I later discovered not to be so great after all), and because they told me that I could work remotely until getting the visa.

I signed the contract, opened a bank account, left my job and came back to Spain.

The silence

Back in Spain I started to prepare myself for the new job — I was looking forward joining a new team. I learnt Python because I saw some people using it at that company’s offices.

I was super motivated and willing to start! I even sent some emails to the CTO to get some instructions on how to setup my development environment.

At my starting date I received the first email from the CTO saying that they were not able to get my visa and that they were thinking about the aspect of working remotely.

I answered them that it wasn’t a problem for me. I had been working remotely for a while and it had never been an issue.

What happened next? Nothing. Silence. I was completely ignored.

The problem

Getting a working visa in the US is not easy. If it was, most developers would be working there. It has gotten a lot better the last years, but companies should start to be more open minded about hiring remote workers.

There is a huge deficit of talent in the US, and a lot of wasted (and way cheaper) talent in other countries around the world. An average engineer in the Bay Area can cost around $100k+. In Spain, the same engineer costs significantly less.

Even though I’m happy I didn’t end up in the states, it would have been cool to be one of the first developers at Uber.

The solution

Ironically, while I was on holiday in San Francisco I was working for [Teambox](now Redbooth), a company with their development team based in Spain.

It was an amazing experience, the development was happening 24 hours a day. The git repository was constantly receiving commits, never sleeping.

It was a great time, that I now look back on as me and Jordi Romero are working on our new project Factorial.

Luckily there’s more and more great companies being built in Europe, and there’s no need to go to the US to land a fantastic job as a developer. Both Madrid (14th) and Barcelona (9th)are climbing on EDCI’s digital city index list every year, and more and more startups are getting funded.

A recent report by Atomico predicts even greater times for European tech in the years to come, so no need to apply for the green card lottery this year, just hold on to your European passport.

This memoir was written by the CTO of Factorial.