Nine o’clock, everywhere
The stand-up is at the same minute in Rotterdam, Novi Sad and Belgrade, because the clocks say the same thing. That sounds trivial until you have worked with a team eight hours away and learned what a day of latency does to a bug. Here a question asked at 9.10 is answered at 9.12, by a colleague, in the same chat, on the same payroll.
The engineers, analysts, architects and DevOps people in all three offices work for the same company under the same contracts, the same confidentiality obligations and the same ISO 27001 controls. There is no vendor in between, no margin on top, no second set of rules. When we say “our team” we mean everyone who reads this stand-up.
How it started
The connection with Serbia is as old as the company. The engineering talent there is deep, the working culture direct, and the founders knew it first-hand. The offices came later (Novi Sad in 2011, Belgrade in 2013) when the collaboration had outgrown a few desks. What did not change is the principle: colleagues, not contractors.
What we do to keep it one company
We visit. A new project starts with the whole team in one room, because the information and the energy of a kick-off do not survive a video call intact. Rotterdam colleagues fly to Belgrade and Novi Sad often enough to know the office, the people and the food. Serbian colleagues come to Rotterdam, and enough of them speak a fair bit of Dutch by now that the lunches are loud. Clients are welcome on those trips too, and several have taken us up on it: meeting the people who build your system changes how the next difficult conversation goes.
Culturally the distance is small. Different football teams, the same programming languages, the same fondness for smart software that does its job for years. The approach from the Serbian side brings new angles to a project. The Dutch side brings the client’s context. Both are needed and both are in the room.
What it means for a client
You get one team with one name on it, and you know who is on it before we start. The engineers who build your system sit in the same stand-up as the ones who will run it, and the people who wrote it are still here when it has been running for ten years. That is a claim we can back with the clients who have stayed. If your policy requires the work to stay inside the EU, say so at the quote stage and we staff it from Rotterdam. Either way, the developers never touch your production data: that rule is the same in all three cities.