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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 - Mirigos (00:06)
Hey, Nicholas, thank you so much for joining our podcast. This podcast is really more of a conversation. We talk about, I call this business of software. We talk about technology, but we don't talk about technology. I don't want to get into technical things. There's so many people that do it way better than I can. And I don't think it's actually as interesting. What I find...
absolutely fascinating is talk about what it actually takes to get the software out there, app software or services, whatever it is. We all manage teams, we all manage different projects, and it's getting more more difficult by the day. And then of course, we'll talk a bit about technology, latest and greatest things, how it affects our lives. Lately, a lot of this been around AI, but it doesn't have to be. There are things that we use daily and it's getting pretty interesting.
Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, introduce yourself please.
Nicholas Ronnei (00:54)
Sure thing. Thanks for having me, Zhenya I'm glad to be here. I am recently back into the business of software. I found myself once again as an engineering manager of the company, or at SnapT, the company that I'm working for right now. And it's been kind of a fun return to the business side of software. I think that...
it hits kind of the perfect niche for me of interesting technical problems to solve, but without having to be the smartest person in the room and the one to really do the deep dive. Cause like you said, that's not as interesting to me. It's kind of fun and it's rewarding to solve the challenge.
but it's not what really gets me going in terms of getting software out the door and building a tangible thing that people can use and benefit from. So I'm excited to be here talking about it with you.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (01:49)
It's interesting. spent, so I've been in technology world and IT career, whatever you want to call it for now 34 years. And I started as an engineer, you know, grew through the ranks. And I can honestly tell you, I was a horrible engineer. I was just absolutely horrible in a big part because I didn't like it. I didn't enjoy it. I enjoy the part of solving a problem. But once I know a solution,
Nicholas Ronnei (02:03)
Ha ha ha.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (02:14)
It becomes really boring to me to go and do things, right? It's like, okay, well, somebody else can go finish this off. Like I don't need to, that's easy. And interestingly enough, I thought of switching. actually thought of getting out of software at some point and just so happened wasn't intentional. I was hired as a manager. You know, they say those that teach can't do. I guess it was those that manage can't do.
Nicholas Ronnei (02:28)
Hmm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (02:38)
But I turned out to be a really good technology leader. So make a manager leader because I brought in the people component, the project management component, the problem solution component, and I got out of the way of people that could actually do a good job. So that's sort of my background.
Nicholas Ronnei (02:57)
Yeah. Yeah. In my time where I transitioned from an individual contributor into a true engineering management role, I think you just touched on some of the hardest lessons to learn. For me, it was really hard to actually just get out of the way and let people do the work. It was the transition period of learning that
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (03:13)
Yeah.
Nicholas Ronnei (03:17)
Just because I don't have my hands in there doesn't mean that I'm not helping deliver and do the thing. My job just is different. The support looks different on how you interact with your team.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (03:28)
Absolutely. I remember, and I'm sure that's the case for many, hopefully not all, but many people. When I was a junior manager, I had two problems. Number one, I wanted to be the smartest guy in the room, right? So it was actually affecting my hiring decisions. Do you hire people that are better than you? Very quickly I learned that you only hire people that are better than you. That was a quick learning. But then there was the opposite.
Nicholas Ronnei (03:41)
Yeah.
Hmm.
Ha
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (03:54)
How do you get respect of your team when they know they're
Nicholas Ronnei (03:58)
That is a much harder problem to solve.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (04:00)
Yeah,
that's very true. I'm sure we all go through that.
Nicholas Ronnei (04:04)
Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.
How did you go about starting to solve that? I'm curious.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (04:10)
So I didn't solve it right away. It wasn't an easy thing, right? I've screwed up myself. I've had people that laughed, you know, over, not old ones, but over the years, right? So I've had it all, but then eventually, so my motto is I hire adults, right? That's something I keep repeating. I hire adults. I hire people that are self-managed, that know what they're doing. And my role is not to be better than them.
Nicholas Ronnei (04:14)
Hmm.
Yeah.
Yes.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (04:38)
my role is to be different than them. In fact, I remember I had an employee who was a fairly junior engineer. And at some point we were talking about something, he wasn't happy about something that I did or company did. I can't even remember the context of it, doesn't matter. conversation went to where he literally said, and that was very telling. You do nothing all day. I never see your program.
All you do is you talk in meetings.
And as telling as it was for me about that employee, it was also very telling for me about myself and their jobs. And so the deal is we have different jobs. Your job is to be technical. Your job is to do this X, Y, and Z. My job is to, at the same time, get out of the way, but also lay the way. Right? So I'm in those meetings deciding things and figuring out things that you don't have to worry about.
So when you get to it, it's there. Right, be it working with a different team, be it a different project, be it, could be, what's the next year's promotions are like, right? It could be anything, right? It's not necessarily technical. It could also be architectural conversations, but not as to how we do this as to, hey, we're gonna build this new product. How's it gonna affect everything that we have already at a higher level? So that's how I think I won that battle.
Nicholas Ronnei (05:41)
Yeah.
Right.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (05:56)
by being very explicit to people who are not in a competition for the same job. I am not trying to tell you I'm better than you are. You're here because I think you're better than me. I just have a different job and I'll do mine and you'll do yours and we'll be happy together.
Nicholas Ronnei (06:09)
Absolutely, absolutely.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (06:11)
So let's talk a little bit about since we're talking about teams, so we're talking about hiring.
Over the past, since COVID, the world changed. And it's interesting, we're still referring to it since COVID. It's been years and years now. We now have population of kids growing up that don't even know what COVID is. But still, that changed the world. And it changed the world. And I'm talking about technology, I'm talking about hiring, right? I'm specifically our topic. It changed the world. Everybody went remote.
Nicholas Ronnei (06:26)
You're right.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (06:38)
Before COVID, I remember everybody was in office and there was occasional I'll work remotely. In my teams, I've had some people that worked remotely. Now, in my company since that I've been running since 2014 were a hundred percent remote since they won, but that's a little different. And then COVID came, everybody went remote, didn't know how to deal with that. And now post COVID, most people are still remote. Most companies are still remote. There's, you know, without getting into what's better and what some companies are doing.
Nicholas Ronnei (06:38)
Yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (07:05)
The fact is most companies are remote. How do you feel about that? How does it affect your day in, day out life? I mean, you're looking at your background, you're probably talking out of your home office. How does it work for your team and for you?
Nicholas Ronnei (07:08)
Mm-hmm.
Indeed.
Great question. So some background first. I was at one of those companies when COVID started that was every day in the office five days a week. And the disruption of everyone works at home now was probably the best thing that ever happened to our software team. Everybody loved that. It was fantastic. It solved so many life challenges. And for me personally, that was a...
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (07:27)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Nicholas Ronnei (07:43)
part of a huge transition that that shift in my life and available time helped led to me losing about 130 pounds over the course of the pandemic and completely changing my lifestyle. Right. All right. And so I knew that when when things started to shift back the other way that I I never wanted to trade that back. I knew that for me that was the life that I wanted to keep.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (07:52)
Wow, okay. That's the opposite from what everybody else was experiencing, right? was, again, you got the 30 pounds during the pandemic. Yeah. That's good. ⁓
Nicholas Ronnei (08:12)
And I know that most of my team felt that way. And by the time I ended up leaving that company for the next thing, we were back two to three days a week doing kind of a hybrid thing, but the work schedule was much more flexible. And I think that in my opinion, that's kind of what people will really want. They just want flexibility.
Whether work is synchronous or asynchronous, it just kind of changes the mechanisms that you need in place for your team to be successful. And as long as you as a leader and a company commit to building those pathways for people, you can be, in my opinion, equally successful as a fully remote organization or as a collaborative co-located organization.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (08:54)
Absolutely. like I said, my company, Mirigos, we've been, so we're in business of helping companies hire internationally engineers. And we focus on technology roles, engineers, technology, anything technology related. We're not an outsourcing company. We have a very unique business format where we really, our tagline is we fixed what's broken in outsourcing because we give you the experience that
the same experience that your local people have, but hiring remotely. So that's what we do. And like I said, my company, when we started, they started in 2014, was a hundred percent remote, right? We don't have anybody in the same city. There's only a couple of people in the same countries, much less cities. Never had an office. But we did have offices for employees, right? Because clients wanted them in the office. COVID came, I think, like by...
Nicholas Ronnei (09:34)
Sure.
Mmm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (09:43)
first month, second month of COVID, I shut down all offices because it like, it was one of those things like I knew it was gonna come back. Well, when it comes back, I'll figure it out. Never looked back, right? So we don't have offices right now. Everybody is remote. And I can see the advantages and disadvantages. So for my company, where everything's remote from day one, all of our communications are remote, meaning.
We're used to it. That's how we operate. That's how we work. We chat, we talk, we jump on Zoom. We became, there are some people that work with me that I have never, most people I've met by traveling, but there are some people I've never met in personal life. But we're still friends, right? We still talk, we know enough about each other. There's enough chit chat going on that that's happening. Now, the flip side of that, when I was in the technology world, there is that water cooler conversation.
There's the, let's go for lunch. There is, we're all sitting in the same office and everybody just breaks into some game, right? That we start throwing papers at each other, whatever it is. And it's silly stuff, but it brings people together. You do not have that remotely and you cannot emulate that remotely. So you have to replace it with something. How do you see that? Now, again, going back from, you know, five days in office to part-time in office to full remote.
Nicholas Ronnei (10:41)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (10:57)
What do you guys do? What works for you to keep the team going together?
Nicholas Ronnei (11:01)
That's a great question. I would say that...
So what I think about in terms of what you've just described is you have to be much more deliberate about community and community spaces in a fully remote world. Snap! the company I'm with now has also been fully remote since day one founding. And yeah, it was only ever the founders that were in the same city and you know, they meet regularly, but
It wasn't really an official kind of office space type of job ever. And when they scaled, they scaled across the whole country. So at my first kind of remote experience, we had the benefit of having been in office and known each other and participated in that community in the old fashioned way. So I think it was a lot easier for us to just kind of keep the ball rolling and create those spaces like.
Okay, you know, we have our weekly virtual kind of lunchtime or happy hour or game session where we take time to just be with each other and make those spaces virtually. But those are habits we'd already formed together. I think that...
in a fully distributed virtual environment, you have to be doing the same kind of things. You have to have a way to set up the water cooler chat and create some kind of affinity groups where people want to be. because a lot of times I find that innovation happens when people cross paths who are in other disciplines. I think a lot of research does the same. think, famously so many fantastic innovations.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (12:15)
Mm-hmm.
Absolutely.
Nicholas Ronnei (12:31)
that came out of MIT happened in, I don't remember the name of the building, but it was one of the buildings set up for the Radar Project, and it just forced people together because they were getting lost all the time. And so creating those community spaces, the way that we try to do that at Snapdisk through, we have like brown bag lunches and other kind of like town halls and department-wide communication.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (12:36)
Right.
Nicholas Ronnei (12:53)
that's synchronous and asynchronous. I think you really need both to be successful.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (12:58)
Is everybody across your team, is everybody US based or you have international as well?
Nicholas Ronnei (13:03)
On my team specifically, I have one person working in Korea right now, though that's temporary. I've got a person in Puerto Rico and then the rest of us are US based, but we're currently hiring in Brazil and a few other Latin American countries as well. And looking to integrate those folks onto the teams that exist today.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (13:22)
Well, that's something we should definitely talk about. Maybe we can help you,
that's... we started... Originally when I started, we started in Eastern Europe. We were hiring in Ukraine, was really great talent, very quickly expanded to other areas of Europe. And then a couple of years later, actually expanded to Latam. And now we do both Latam and Eastern Europe. Latam, numbers-wise, it's bigger. So we have more people in Latin America.
And we're hiring more people in Latin America because of the time zone. But we do both. Those are two areas we cover. We don't touch Asia. We don't touch anything else. Just our expertise are not there. Cool. So let's talk a bit about technology. I want to switch the topic a little bit.
Nicholas Ronnei (13:52)
Sure.
Yeah, what?
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (14:05)
How do you think technology today is changing hiring, employment, education? And I know it's very broad question, but it's something that I've been hearing a lot from different people, AI, are we still gonna hire engineers? Are we still gonna like, what are we gonna do? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm wondering how you guys use AI? How do you?
see it evolving, not AI necessarily, but how our lives around it are evolving. I don't think we should talk about AI itself, let's open AI and others think about that. But yeah.
Nicholas Ronnei (14:40)
Right. Yeah.
Sure. So starting with hiring and just kind of more generally how technology has changed that. My background is in geography and in grad school one of the units I worked with was focused on a discipline called coupled human and natural systems. And one of the biggest things that
People talked about in that discipline is how advancing technology, particularly around information and learning and what we do as business, uh, moving all of that into, I don't know, telemetrics, like the internet video calls, all of that would affect systems and goods distribution and how all of that comes together. The biggest way that I see that today in, in my role and in the work that we do.
Is I never dreamed that I would have the opportunity to be regularly working with people who live in different countries and that we live in, we get to pick kind of how we want to live our life. gives an unprecedented flexibility, lowers costs to businesses and just does a whole lot for everybody. So I think, you know, that's obviously the big one that I play into day to day, but,
AI has definitely changed the way that we hire and the way that we think about work as well. we have AI in our product at Snapped. So we are a solution for fraud detection from the multifamily housing space. And one of the best things that we can do for our clients is make it really easy to avoid bad debt and avoid the problems that come after.
You've leased an apartment to someone who is fraudulent and committing fraud against you. So we have AI to detect fraud on documents. We're also working on AI based systems to extract information from the documents that they upload to make it easier on the leasing teams to make good decisions about who they're letting in and summarize the complex information that they're used to reading into small, easy to act on bites.
So in the product, it's that way. And then building the product, we are using AI quite extensively on the engineering front.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (16:58)
Okay, interesting you touched on something really cool. I'm a landlord, right? A small landlord, but I go through this every time I evaluate new tenants and people don't realize how much fraud there is. Like people just don't realize it and you know.
Nicholas Ronnei (17:02)
Okay.
Sure.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (17:12)
being in the business and being in IT, I sort of have an eye for it. Doesn't mean I catch it all. I'm sure I'm gonna miss some, but yeah, somebody sends you a pay stub and you're looking at it and you're like, did you even check the numbers that you listed? Like they don't add up, like basic stuff. It's fine that you went and you changed your gross pay. Shouldn't you also change deposit to the bank? Like that just doesn't add up to me.
Nicholas Ronnei (17:17)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (17:37)
And you get that a lot. It's only a matter of time until it will get better because there are AI tools to detect it, there are AI tools to create it. And it's a war of a machine, really.
Nicholas Ronnei (17:48)
Absolutely.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (17:49)
another just funny thing you mentioned, right? You never mentioned working internationally and having geography, right? So it's like sort of you look at the world. Somebody asked me that long ago, this conversation about AI and like the question was to me, what's the tool that you think is changing our world, our daily world the most? And they expected me to say something about AI or something like zoom.
Nicholas Ronnei (18:10)
straight up
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (18:12)
That's it.
Zoom. Yes, there was Skype. Yes, there was something else. Zoom is easy. Everybody's using it. It became a standard. This is it. So that's what changed our world the most. Basic stuff. But interesting. Talking about AI, one thing that we see a lot, so both from the hiring perspective and from the process perspective.
Candidates use AI tools to try to cheat the system. Companies try to use AI tools to evaluate a candidate. Both fail at some point, both fail. The weirdest one I've had, I actually had two of them now. Well, not me personally, but my guys in the company. When they screened the candidate doing technical screen, it was a deep fake. It was a not.
Nicholas Ronnei (18:38)
sure.
Yes.
Wow.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (18:59)
an actual person. And one of them was very easy to tell. The other one was not the guy talking suspected something and his fast thinking helped. And we now have that as a process. any time we talk to somebody, we ask them to put a hand in front of camera. Just do this. As of right now, DeepFake cannot handle it.
Nicholas Ronnei (19:01)
interesting.
Interesting.
Huh.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (19:20)
give it another two weeks, they probably will, but for now, they can't do it. But it was interesting. that's like, wow. Why would you invest so much into doing this just to get a job? Like it's not worth it, right? You're not beating the system, you're just getting a job. But yeah, but how do you think that's gonna affect hiring? How do you think like you guys are hiring for the company?
Nicholas Ronnei (19:25)
Right.
Yeah, that's kind what I was wondering.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (19:46)
Are you seeing any changes in level of people you're hiring? you seeing any level or any changes in the process using it or using tools? I'm not gonna say AI, I'm just gonna say using tools because it could be anything.
Nicholas Ronnei (19:58)
Yeah. So one of the direct changes that we made to this last round of hiring as a result of AI is we made the choice to eliminate our like take home challenge type of questions. Any kind of like pre-work that you do with code because just run it through AI and it's going to build something that's passable and doesn't really matter what your actual skill level is.
you're still going to be able to pass that technical challenge if you have any level of skill and you can talk to an AI. So yeah, that was the biggest one. And instead what we tried to do to combat that is ask questions that would give people a chance to demonstrate their passion for the work and ask them deeper probing questions about.
their past work and what they've learned specifically, what they've taken away from that and the things that have changed them and how they think about what they do. And I think that was really valuable. We used that across three different tiers, none of them entry level. I think that hiring for entry level positions will be continually harder and harder as AI gets better and better.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (21:08)
I also think it'll be harder and harder to find entry-level positions because AI, like, there's a company that I know, they're a client, but I just know them for a long time. They've always had a very extensive summer internship program. They decided to cancel this year altogether because, yeah, and they know it's unfortunate. They know, and they hope to restart it in a different format next year, but they did for this year.
Nicholas Ronnei (21:21)
Yeah.
Really.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (21:32)
And their logic was you can't argue. said, listen, it cost us a lot to run this program, not just in direct costs, but we have people dedicated to it because we have to get these people going. We have to train them. And then we get something out of them. In the past, what we give them most of the time, entry-level stuff, things that nobody else wants to do. So they take care of this. But what we use it for mostly is to evaluate future.
Nicholas Ronnei (21:38)
Right.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (21:56)
And so we look at this to make sure that there's people that we want to hire in the future. And that became already much more difficult because of everybody being remote, because it's no longer... They work with a specific college, specific university where they get people from, which was local, but now local doesn't matter. And they said all these tasks that we used to give to them, we now have AI handling. We don't need it.
Nicholas Ronnei (22:04)
Yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (22:20)
And so the cost was just too expensive. They decided not to do it. But again, they're going to revaluate what's going to happen in the future. But interestingly about interview process, so we have two types of clients, right? And anything in between. One, now when you're doing life interview, life coding interview, you can no longer share the entire, just the screen, share the, well, just the window, share the entire screen because then when I see there's nothing else on the screen.
Nicholas Ronnei (22:20)
Right.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (22:44)
And I sort of laugh about it because I go, how do know there's not a laptop sitting next to it? But that's fine. And then there's another side of it. We want to make sure you use AI tools while you're doing this because we care about how you use tools more than we care about how you write a particular line of
Nicholas Ronnei (22:44)
Sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (22:58)
And it's like this or that. Go figure.
Nicholas Ronnei (23:00)
Yeah,
well truly. And that's another change that we made to our process is asking people how they use AI. And we had two kind of similar polls that we were screening for on that. We didn't want people who straight up vibe coded their way through everything and just let the AI do all the work.
We wanted a healthy dose of skepticism and, and knowing how to actually apply the tools to the right problems. However, we also didn't want people who didn't use AI. We as an organization have made the choice to commit and we want that, that productivity boost and that essentially, you know, pair programmer for when you don't get to have somebody else right next to you. And yeah, so we kind of, picked the middle of that lane.
And it's producing pretty good results for us so far in this round of hiring.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (23:50)
Great. Well, it's very interesting. It's definitely changing, right? Things are changing and they're changing so fast. I'm excited. I'm also worried.
Nicholas Ronnei (23:58)
Yes. Anytime things change this quickly, I don't trust people fully who say they aren't nervous about it.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (24:05)
Yeah,
I'm actually more worried about like I'm not worried about myself. I'm at the point where it is what it is. You know, I'll take, you I'll take the best and then we'll see what happens. But you know, kids, I've got two kids that are growing up and my older one is applying to colleges this summer and you know, going to college next year. And I'm thinking half of the jobs that were the best possible jobs even a couple of years ago today.
Nicholas Ronnei (24:09)
Yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (24:31)
Pointless, know, thankfully he's not into any of those, it's computer science. Like two, three years ago, probably the best, if you're into it, right, if you like it, it was one of the best jobs. Today, I don't know if I want to suggest to any of my friends to go and do just regular development work. Just probably not there.
Nicholas Ronnei (24:43)
Yes.
I think it's a risky play and I've been thinking a lot about this recently too. It's just, it's very interesting to me. I've been seeing some folks online talking about AI and the way that this is gonna revolutionize how we think about information and solve problems the same way as like Google search did in 2004. And I think that it's gonna be really similar. There's gonna be entire industries like print and phone books.
that are going to be just about gone. And I think that this one is substantially larger because it's a tool that's just so elastic and can apply across so many different domains. I think.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (25:23)
I love
And we're so early
on in its development that if you think about how far we've traveled in the last six, nine months, you can only imagine what is going to happen in the next six to nine months. it's, yeah.
Nicholas Ronnei (25:37)
Yeah.
Truly,
the creative destruction of the whole thing will be magnificent to behold. After a decade of this, I'll be curious to see what amazing things we've done and what has fallen into disuse alongside of that.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (25:59)
Yeah. Well, Nicholas, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. was a very interesting conversation. A lot of different things, very non-standard topics, but they're great. Thank you.
Nicholas Ronnei (26:09)
Absolutely, thank you so much, Zhenya I really enjoyed this.