This story appears in the March/April print edition of iTECH, a supplement to Transport Topics.
Technology companies clearly need programmers and developers who can write computer code, but that is only the start. “You can have really great developers, but you’ve also got to have quality assurance looking at everything that is being developed and testing for bugs,” said Laura Leili of TMW.
TALENT SEARCH: Tech companies compete for qualified personnel
FRONT LINES: IT interns share their stories
Technical training for support staff is also in issue. “There can be a debate over whether the customer-service team should be considered a technical workgroup,” Leili said. “In our world, it very much is, because we’ve got to have people supporting our clients who have a technical mindset and knowledge base.”
McLeod takes a similar approach. “Many of McLeod’s employees are customer-facing and in order for them to provide the best customer experience, it is important that they have a good understanding of the industry application for the technology that we provide,” Meribeth Gilbert said.
CarrierWeb places an emphasis on hiring technically knowledgeable product managers, “so that they can understand what the customer wants and can write the requirements in a way that can be easily coded within the CarrierWeb architecture,” R. Fenton-May said.
At Peloton, the nature of the work and the size of the company require people who think broadly, Dave Lyons said. “We have a very multidisciplinary team and we’re very lean, so everyone needs to be T-shaped. The letter T has overall breadth and a single depth. We want people who have a breadth of technical knowledge and deep expertise in a single area. We need people who think about the big picture.”
— Bruce Lilly
