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Honest conversations with the engineering leaders, CTOs, founders, and engineers building real software with real teams. No fluff, no hype — just the messy, human side of getting great products out the door.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (00:06)
Chris, hi. Thanks so much for joining us at this episode of Build the Humans. It's a podcast we started doing about eight, nine months ago. We talk about technology from the human side of things, what it takes to build products, what it takes to build teams. Everybody loves to talk about tech. Everybody loves to talk about the latest and greatest toys, or sorry, I to say tools, but really there are people behind it that really make it all happen.
I run a company called Mirigos. We are a team augmentation and outstaffing company. So all we do is we help our clients hire high caliber talent across Latin America and Europe. Don't do any projects. Don't like we, our motto is we fix what's broken and outsourcing. And that means it's very heavily human oriented. So that's us. Tell us about you. Give us short introduction.
Chris Carter (00:53)
Awesome.
Yeah, I'm Chris Carter. I'm the founder of a company called Approyo. And what we do is we provide services to organizations running SAP software. So no matter if it's the cloud, the licensing, the implementation, the managed services, we built our own IP to manage, run, and support those organizations. And we help companies around the globe really get their SAP system dialed in with the right activities. And it is all about
humans and we've got some great tools but it is about our humans.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (01:28)
So interesting, you're really a service company, right? It's not so much, I mean, you have products obviously, but... ⁓
Chris Carter (01:34)
We have IT,
but it's a lot of service activities to help those companies to grow and to use that SAP environment to its most optimal level.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (01:45)
Yeah, and you mentioned it's global. Your customers are global. I know from our previous conversation, your company is global. So let's talk a bit about.
culture, right? And this is where I sort of want to start. We both live in the US and we're used to dealing with people in US and everybody sort of has the playbook, right? We expect this and this and that. And I'll give you an example. was actually a true story. I ran a team. I was still running an engineering team. I ran a team in Europe.
Chris Carter (01:57)
Thank
Zhenya Rozinskiy (02:15)
and the guys came over to visit us in the US office. And the first day they're in, they go into the, it was Monday. So they go into meeting, right? We're all sitting there, working in, they walk out and this was the first time they came in. Everybody knew them by Zoom or back then, whatever Skype we used. Yeah, it was before Zoom days. And so, you know, I woke up to them and say, so how was it? You know, did you like it? And the two of them, and they look at me and go, we just wasted, I don't know.
Chris Carter (02:29)
Thank you so much.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (02:41)
half an hour, 20 minutes. We talked about nothing. Everybody talked about their weekend. Everybody talked about what they did over the weekend. I came into the meeting. I didn't come there to chit chat. And then I go into US based guys. And I said, so what do you think of them? It's a team. is it first time? They're great. They're really smart. But I don't get this absolutely absence of the social aspect. They just jump in. They want to talk business. They don't want to talk.
Chris Carter (03:07)
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, that's a big difference between the rest of the world and us, especially if you go to Germany. My German team, they are boom, boom, boom, boom. And, you know, I'm I'm kind of the same way I I'll chit chat and I'll be I'll go to the coffee and I'll go to coffee clutching and all those activities and I do stuff. But when I'm in work mode, I'm in work mode and I really want to be focused on work mode.
and those activities wrapped around it. So I can understand that to a degree, but yeah, yeah, it's, there are so many different ways that individuals around the globe have been taught to be in business. Some of them are just nothing but here it is straight-laced. Others like the United States.
are all about it and we go from there.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (03:57)
Yep, yep, absolutely. So interestingly then, having international clients and international team, what was that moment when you realized, shoot, distributed international global teams, it's not the same as everybody sitting in the same room or a same room.
Chris Carter (04:16)
Well, the first time I ever experienced that was I was actually doing work with SAP themselves. I had been in college and I had been doing internships with non, with all US based companies. And all of a sudden I get involved with SAP software themselves and I'm starting to go through and people are not chit chatting at the coffee pot. People are not interacting in a
American socialized way. And so I had to learn pretty quickly who the right individuals were, who the right individuals. And it literally was an eye opening experience for this young guy. And it just taught me when I started working with the folks at SAP who are German based, that they are more straight-laced. Sure, they like their vacation time and they'll take two months of vacation all the time. But at the end of the day,
They're there to work and they're focused on the work and they're going to make sure that the work is on and they'll work long hours to do those types of activities. And you may not chit chat, you might not even know who their kids are. You may not even know if they're married. You may not even know what's going on in their life. And it goes from there.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (05:22)
Right?
And then on a Friday, they go to their version of sauna where everybody is butt naked and deal with your coworkers. Yeah.
Chris Carter (05:36)
Yes, yes.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (05:37)
I had that. So I was at a conference and met a of people and people I met for the first time, people that I knew very casually. And then in the evening they go, well, we're going to sauna. I'm like, cool, let's go to sauna. I did not expect.
Chris Carter (05:38)
Yes.
I agree.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (05:54)
Yeah.
All right, so how do you, doing the things you do and having the team that's distributed and that is naturally culturally diverse, right? Just by virtue of being all over the place. How do you get them to work together? How do you get them to understand each other and respect each other's personality and each other's style?
Chris Carter (06:14)
Well, to me, it's twofold. One, it's inherent. You are working at a global company. Don't be thinking that you are bigger, better, stronger, whatever than anybody else. You are part of this entity. You're part of this company. You better make sure that you're friendly with your coworkers. Now, do you have to be their best buds, their BFFs and walk through and go from there? No. But you know what?
Zhenya Rozinskiy (06:26)
Hm?
Chris Carter (06:41)
You at least need to make sure and you understand what they're doing, how they're doing, why they're doing those types of activities. You don't have to sit at the coffee pot with them and go from there. Secondarily, it's I'm a firm believer that you should respect everybody. You don't have to like everybody, but respect everybody. Be tolerant, be understanding, be a coworker.
Don't be some jerk that's going to sit there and go, my god, this guy's this, or this girl's that, and that. nobody wants to hear that crap. And to be honest and tell you the truth, that's kind of BS happens. I'm not going to keep you around my company. If it gets back to me that you are that type of individual through our entire vetting process, we're going to have some discussions. I don't care what your religion is. I don't care what your politics are. I don't care what your.
your color. I don't care. Are you good at your job that I've hired you for and you're going to be the type of person that's going to make our company better? If not, you will not be here. If you are, then you will be here.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (07:41)
I see this so many times and this is one of the things why I started Mirigas and why I decided to make that a business. I see this a lot where US companies, right, US based companies, they'll go and they'll hire somebody in other countries. And I mean, literally anywhere, there's no specific, like I can't be specific. Well, this country is better, that one is not. It's all the same. And then they always look at it. We here versus them there.
Right? We make the decisions, they get to follow our decisions. We were going to have a meeting and decide how to resolve this problem and we'll tell them how to do this. And I always ask, and this was even when I was running my teams, engineering teams, you know, on the other side of table, and I heard that a lot. And I would say, hold on, did we hire a talented person or did we hire somebody who knows how to push buttons? Like, what do we do if we need to replace them, we'll replace them.
Chris Carter (08:35)
Right. If you're just a button pusher, I can replace you on a heartbeat. But if you're somebody who is actually involved and ingrained in our business, in our culture, in who we are as an organization, and ingrained with the people that work in this company, absolutely, we're lockstep between each other.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (08:39)
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. That said, running a global company in so many different regions, I know you mentioned you have people in Asia, have people in all over the place, Latin America. Do you see more or less natural alliances or natural conflicts that come up because of the cultural differences, because of how people do work, because of our difference, whatever the reasons
Chris Carter (09:16)
Do I see cultural differences around the globe no matter who, what? There's always gonna be cultural differences. Everybody's got an opinion. Opinions are like rear ends, everybody's got one. So do you see cultural differences? Absolutely. And it's also a meaningful activity. You're gonna see cultural changes simply from the fact that people don't understand each other's culture. I remember the first time I went to
Zhenya Rozinskiy (09:25)
you
Chris Carter (09:41)
India or when I went to China or when I went to Israel or went to wherever in the world. I didn't know what I didn't know but I also didn't put my American hat on and say I'm the big American you must listen to me and you're gonna do I don't care about you. No you don't do that kind of stuff. That's why again you act like a human being you treat each other like human but are you gonna have differences? Absolutely. Look at the globe that we're in now.
You know, you've got all these different conflicts and religious sayings and political things. But at the end of the day, what you got to come up with, and this is what I say. Again, I made the reference a moment ago. I don't care about your religion. I don't care about your background. don't care your color or your creed. I don't care who you're sleeping with. I don't care about that. Are you a good person? If you're not a good person, well, then we're going to have some conflict. If you are those type of person that
It's always about me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, you're gonna listen to me and you're gonna do what I say. No, ho, ho, ho. Hold the phone here. I sign your checks. You're going to listen to me. You're gonna do what I say. You're gonna do it how I do it. And you're gonna do one whatever. But I don't do that. We as an organization, and I feel this way, that if you're a good person, you're a good person to everybody. If you're a crappy person, you're gonna be a crappy person to everybody.
one at least one time or some time. So we try not to hire crappy people. We believe in hiring good people. Again, I don't care what their makeup is. Are they good to the people that they work with, people that they service, and the activities going forward? If you do all those things properly, you're gonna you're gonna do well in my company. If not, you are not gonna be in this company because we're gonna find you out and we're gonna alleviate you.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (11:22)
Yeah, yeah. And in your company, it's especially important, right? Because it's not, you got clients, right? It's service. Service is different than product. Product, you can get away with sitting in the corner and nobody ever sees you, nobody knows your name, you're just doing your job. And if you're a NAS, you're a NAS. Yeah.
Chris Carter (11:38)
Yeah, just a keyboard where you can hide
if you want to with your headphones on.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (11:43)
We do this, right? We have a bunch of recruiters. Recruiters never, in our case, recruiters never interface with clients. So we have somebody who runs our recruiting team, she interfaces with clients, I obviously interface with clients, but recruiters interface with candidates. And I always tell them that's as important. They're our clients too, right? We don't...
How do we recruit? How do we hire? How do we attract them? How do we tell them we're better than somebody else? Why do you want to come work for us, ultimately for our client, but why do you want to come work with us as opposed to about a billion other companies that are out there that are doing the same thing or similar things? So yeah, mean, everybody, know, it's, if you're a good person, if you heart in the right place, if you understand the business, I think that's another very important factor, right? You got to understand what it is we're doing.
Chris Carter (12:29)
Oh, exactly. You've got to look, you've got to understand, and then you've got to continue to learn about the business, because our business is always changing and always evolving. And we want those individuals to be a part of that change and a part of that modification. You know, we're going through changes and modifications right now with the company. We're making growth and we're moving it forward in the largest SAP upgrade cycle in history. And we want people to be a part of that. We don't want them to be a hindrance of that.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (12:35)
Yep.
Chris Carter (12:57)
We also want people to keep moving forward with their careers and we want to help bring them up the ladder of success. But if you're not willing to do that on your own accord, we can't drag you to the water and make you drink it.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (13:11)
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, was way too many. We deal a lot with engineering talent, right? Different types of engineering, but it's all software development engineering. And we see lot of, unfortunately, a lot of people less in the US, but we also don't do a lot of hiring in the US. We do international hiring, but in certain places where...
I'm an engineer. Tell me what to do. And I'll do it. Yeah. And then.
Chris Carter (13:31)
yeah, this is my bod.
Oh, you want me
to code? What do you want me to code? This is the code that I do. This is how long I do. And this is it. You are 100 % correct.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (13:41)
Yeah, it's unfortunate. In some places it's better, right? I mean, I can tell you from different, different. And it goes obviously individually a lot, but also region by region. There's, we see sort of.
I don't know, there's certain things that in certain regions are better than others. think, yeah. But we do, we see this and you know, I have this thing. when we interview somebody, we always, they know, you know, before the interview, they know the company they're interviewing for, they have the position. So they know all of this. We don't hide any of this. And so when we get on the phone and sometimes I'll interview people, like if I need to, will, but very rarely.
Chris Carter (13:55)
yes, well, right there with you.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (14:17)
But everybody who does it, they'll go, well, do you have any questions?
Chris Carter (14:21)
And they'll say no.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (14:22)
Well, so there is the second worst, which is though they'll say no, there is the worst. They jump directly. What are your benefits? How many vacation do I get?
Chris Carter (14:31)
Yes.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (14:32)
And I always go, you're not going to fit. Not because you're a bad engineer, not because you're a bad person, but you really don't care. You're looking at this as a paycheck, right? You're just going to come in and you're going to tell me to do this and I'll do this. And you tell me to something else, I'll do that as long as my paycheck is there. And that's not who we hire. That's not who our clients were.
Chris Carter (14:51)
Yeah, and we get that a lot because we we we do hire people for full time with our company directly and then we do ad hoc Depending upon a project that we need somewhere somehow we have to fill in for an activity It happens all the time and a lot of times it's interesting the same way we've had people that Not only do they think it's just a paycheck, but they think that they can just milk that paycheck
Zhenya Rozinskiy (15:15)
Mm-hmm
Chris Carter (15:16)
Hey guys, you're only here for 40 hours. Well, the client needed me for this, this, and this, and it ended up being 60 hours. No, your contract says 40 hours. Anything above that 40 hours has to get approved. Well, I've already worked those 40 hours. Well, you should have thought about that. Contract states, this is what you do. Oh, by the way, I asked that customer and they said, well, that should have only taken 30 hours. Why are you taking 60 hours?
There's this whole group of people in this one specific country that starts with an I and it's not Italy that everything can be just drawn out. And we have a whole lot of trouble with that.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (15:45)
Yeah, yeah.
That specific entry has tremendous engineering talent, but also has the issue of we'll never say no, and we will never disagree with you. So we'll nod our head and pretend we know what we're doing. And then a minute before the deadline, we'll say, it didn't work out, sorry.
Chris Carter (16:09)
We weren't able to do it. We weren't able to finish. We weren't able to do this. Sorry.
Yeah, right there with you.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (16:15)
And
one thing that I, again, back in the days when I ran Teams, I moved all the apps in Europe. Back then Latin America wasn't big. So was all Europe because of the time difference, right? It's so much easier, even though it's still pretty significant time difference, but there's plenty of overlap in the day where you can talk to people. You get to know people, you get to interact with them. It's not an email. It's not a, you know, it's 9 a.m. here, it's 9 p.m. there. That just doesn't work.
Chris Carter (16:44)
I agree. And that's, well, we still have our, we have our own private limited company there, but I love our team in Brazil. Our team in Brazil is fantastic. Our team out of Brussels is fantastic. So.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (16:51)
Yeah.
Yeah, cool. Well, very interesting. It seems like we're sharing a lot of the same experiences. And yeah, I got burned at some point. The whole thing is how I started this. literally got burned. I ran teams on every continent by now, literally. No Antarctica, but every other continent. And I just got burned at this.
ever running will of replacing people, replacing companies. I just want to find somebody who's good, who's part of the company. We got guys that have been with us for, and when I say with us, they're with us, but there was a client for easily three, four five years and everybody's very happy. Nobody thinks of them as an outsider. Nobody thinks of them as their contractor. They're part of the team. Many startups, we have some larger companies, but we also have lots of startups.
Chris Carter (17:28)
Right?
Zhenya Rozinskiy (17:42)
startups give them stock options or stock grants, whatever they do, they treat them just like employees.
Chris Carter (17:47)
Right? Yeah. And that's a great thing. know, treat them with respect. Treat them just like you would anybody else. And they're going to do just as well for you, know?
Zhenya Rozinskiy (17:54)
Absolutely. Well, Chris, thank you so much. This is fun. Actually, I want to ask one more question. You have tremendous experience, like a lot of years of experience. What's your suggestion to people that are listening to this? Everybody's running global teams. Not everybody understands the secret of it. Just share your wisdom. Share what you have in mind so somebody else can follow.
Chris Carter (17:57)
Yeah, thank you.
too much.
So the one thing I would say is hire incredible people that will be able to interview, we're able to get the legal contracts, make sure all that stuff is together, and then trust your gut when you're hiring people. When you hire overseas, if you think somebody is not who they think they are, you're probably right. If you think somebody is just playing the game to get a paycheck, trust your gut.
If you think somebody even in the United States, if you think somebody is just, something just doesn't feel right or seem right, it's probably not right. Trust your gut because remember, once you hire them, there's some ramifications depending upon which country. But if you don't hire them at all, you've got 10 people behind you that are right there that you don't have to worry about. If you feel more comfortable with them, trust your gut because this too shall pass. That feeling will go away and you'll be like, you know what?
Zhenya Rozinskiy (19:00)
There's that.
Chris Carter (19:11)
I like this one because I really don't have a feeling about, bad feeling about
Zhenya Rozinskiy (19:16)
I think that's the best one. I rely on my gut a lot and sometimes even I read the resume and I go something's off. I don't know what it is, but something is off. Yeah.
Chris Carter (19:26)
Yeah, I
agree.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (19:28)
long time away before AI takes over our jobs.
Chris Carter (19:31)
⁓ you know, AI is just going to make you bigger, better, stronger and faster. And I'm now looking for those people that are taking AI and using it, using Anthropic, using Claude, using the code base. If you're doing that, I'm the person that's going to hire you because I like that. If you're not even touching that yet, and you're worried that it's going to take your job, I'm sorry. It's not going to take your job. It's just going to make you bigger, better, strong, because we all need human beings.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (19:41)
For sure.
Chris Carter (19:57)
to help with the code development and design and functionality. So if you're afraid of it, you're not going to be the person that's coming on my team anyways.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (20:04)
I have a great friend who is also in a big way a mentor of mine, right? Somebody I look up to, somebody I talk to a lot, like he's a great guy and he runs a very good company. He's based in Canada and he's very big on innovation. He's very big on change, right? And he wants the whole company to embrace it. And so he's big on AI. And so when he started pushing it in his company, and we're talking a couple of hundred people.
I started pushing into his company, people got afraid. And so I started talking to them and they all said, well, I'm afraid the jobs, my job's going to get replaced by AI. And I think his response was the best. And he was the first one I've heard it from. Said the AI will not replace your job. The person that knows and uses AI will.
Chris Carter (20:50)
Exactly, that's exactly what I say. I literally speak around the globe and that's the thing I tell people. I want bigger, better, stronger, faster humans who can utilize AI and I've been not only my company, but for our customers. And those are the people that you need to be afraid of. The ones that take on and want to just go to town with anthropic and gemini and anything else that you're going to.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (21:01)
Mm-hmm.
Chris Carter (21:16)
Those are the people that are gonna take everybody's jobs. So learn it now or get out of the way because you're gonna get steamrolled.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (21:22)
For sure, for sure. All right, Chris, thank you so much. Thanks for your time.
Chris Carter (21:26)
Thank you and much more
to you. Appreciate it. Have a great one.