As a kid, I enjoyed watching MTV’s show “Pimp my ride”. The premise was simple: Transform an old vehicle into a high-tech masterpiece. It taught me that no matter how bad things might look, they can be improved beyond recognition.

Recently, I started drawing more and more parallels between cars and software development projects.

Not so long ago, we took over a legacy project for a client, one of the biggest names in the entertainment industry, whose products are used by millions of people worldwide.

We successfully kicked off the project amidst the start of the global pandemic, worked remotely the entire time, and are now finishing up our fourth release. What a ride this has been!

Working on a new project is like having a brand new car, only without the “new car smell”. The development team is responsible for and aware of every aspect of the product from the very beginning. The way the team “drives” the project affects its shape and outcome.

Yet, more often than not, team members on software development projects will most likely inherit the work of their many past colleagues. Just like the number of previous owners, mileage and age will take its toll on the interior and exterior of a car, the experience of working on a particular software project is shaped by the number of people involved, the size of the codebase, architectural patterns and tech stack.

The question poses itself: Is it possible to “pimp” projects and make them as good as new?

In software development, we often use the terms “legacy code” and “legacy projects” to describe the projects and codebases that are old and difficult to maintain. Yet, some sources state that there is a common false perception that “legacy code” is an old or poorly written program.

The correct definition of “legacy code” is an application system source code type that is no longer supported. “Legacy code” can also refer to unsupported operating systems, hardware, and formats.

I agree this is true, but I would also state that the term “legacy project” is often used colloquially, as it’s mostly used to describe ongoing projects with:

None of the above-mentioned challenges help in the situation when teams are transitioning on and off of the project. However, with proper planning and execution, many risks can be mitigated.

In the following paragraphs, we’re sharing the tried and tested methods for more efficient work on legacy projects.

Even before negotiating cooperation, we knew we would deal with codebases that were written more than seven years ago and developed and maintained by numerous people.

One of the first things we suggested was to review the codebases. We assigned two senior engineers to do a thorough check of both iOS and Android apps and deliver a written report about the dependencies, codebases, architecture, packages, and the data layers used on the project.

The report outlined the main project characteristics and its potential flaws. According to that, we made a prioritised list of action points we would tackle once the project starts. Besides, it helped us manage expectations with the client and schedule the right people for the project.

Experienced engineers are crucial people for the first few weeks of project takeover. We scheduled two of our senior engineers to set everything up as well as to identify and prioritize improvements and tasks.

This made it easier to nail time estimates and helped a lot with onboarding the new engineers to the project later on.

We were taking over a series of apps, so every team member had downloaded the apps and played with them for a couple of hours just to get a glimpse of what we’re dealing with. We also wanted to be well aware of the app features and content before the kickoff sessions.

This made our discussions with the client more engaging and productive because we already had some knowledge about the apps, terminology, and the scope of the future work.

We had a whole day kickoff-session planned for our first day of cooperation. The idea was to get to know each other better and discuss the work agreements that could help us in the future.

The agenda was:

After getting to know each other’s way of working, we focused our discussion to specific tasks that the client had already prepared. Therefore, the team was able to start working immediately after the kickoff.

Although the above-mentioned circumstances gave us the possibility to dive into tasks early on, a lot of challenges arose along the way.

Read on about some of the challenges which we identified and tackled as we progressed.

Initially, we had a lot of trouble with permissions as we couldn’t access some parts of the collaboration tools, design files, external links on task descriptions, and other. It took a lot of back and forth pinging to get a hold of this critical information.

Patience was key here, from our end and from the client’s end. Neither enjoyed the fact that sometimes we had to have a middleman when accessing important info, but the client eventually came up with a solution and we were able to see the things only related to our part of the work.

Due to the fact that it was the first time that the client worked with an external agency, the task descriptions we initially received were often not written to the level of detail we could easily understand. This slowed things down and sometimes made estimating tasks difficult.

The client’s team was as responsive as it gets and each question was answered the minute it arrived. Our team was encouraged to ask about anything that wasn’t clear and their team was patient and precise when providing answers.

I’m proud to say our developers are spoiled to some degree in terms of the tools we use in development. Once you come across an older project, you become grateful for things you sometimes take for granted.

In this case, localization related tasks were the most time consuming because the client didn’t use any localization management tools, something we use on all of our projects. The fact that their apps support 13 languages didn’t work in our favor.

For localization purposes, we internally developed a tool called Polyglot. The idea was to have all application strings in one place and share them between platforms. By using Polyglot, translations across platforms are consistent, and the chance of developer error when copying the strings in the app minimal.

We strongly advocate the use of such tools whenever it’s possible because they not only make us faster, but make our work less prone to errors.

You guessed it – the legacy code itself was our main challenge.

Due to the already mentioned pain points, we faced loads of unused code, and comments like “Have this fixed before person X leaves the company (from 3 years ago)” scattered throughout.

We agreed that we’ll have dedicated time for project improvements and refactoring. It will definitely be a long process but the best time to start is always now.

Chances are, developers won’t be excited to work on legacy projects. I confess that the enthusiasm wasn’t the highest when we were starting our project.

However, four months in and four releases later, we have a team of people who know their voices are heard. We’ve already built a functioning ecosystem with the client and continuously strive to help them with future projects.

I know I can’t make an MTV show out of it, but I still enjoy a good transformation story and I’m really proud to be a part of this one.

You, as a recruiter, have never had a harder job of capturing the candidate’s attention. However, don’t despair–you’ve also never had quite this much tech at hand to use as your weapons.

There seems to be a lot of buzz around this mystical new generation; people born from 1995 and onwards. Some call it Generation Z, some still use the term Millennials; however you want to call us — we don’t really care.

As a representative of this generation I can honestly say we couldn’t care less about formal labels. But there’s an interesting characteristic about us: we are the first generation that has surfed the web before we could even read properly. And believe me, it’s certainly impacted how we behave today.

Digital natives were born just around the time technology was shifting into the fourth gear. Consequently, it has affected almost every aspect of our lives— including how we search for jobs. Having recently gone through the process, I’ve noticed that recruiters and employers don’t know this young group of people quite as well as they think.

Hence, here’s a handy guide for recruiters hiring digital natives from the first-hand perspective of a true-born digital native, fresh off the job market at 23.

We are the first generation that grew up with the Internet (fortunate or not, you decide). Computers, mobile phones, video games and social networks produced a constant stream of information that was poured upon us from our earliest age.

The aftermath? Our attention is very, very hard to capture!

Smart people have done the math. For the generation before us (born between 1980 and 1995) the average attention span is 12 seconds, whereas ours times out after just 8 seconds. Surprised?

Microsoft’s report on this topic says: “Heavy multi-screeners find it difficult to filter out irrelevant stimuli — they’re more easily distracted by multiple streams of media.”

Basically, you need to capture the attention of a person watching Netflix, scrolling through a social media app and chatting between numerous WhatsApp groups, all at the same time. That are digital natives in their natural habitat.

At the peak of consumerism and in a world where everything we own/wear serves as a status symbol, it might come as a surprise that dollar bills aren’t our number one reason to get out of bed in the morning.

As a matter of fact, this large study revealed that “…for the first time, we see a generation prioritizing purpose in their work.”

With this in mind, check out our top work values:

As you can see, we are more concerned with taking pride and finding purpose in what we do than with our compensation. Some recruiters are onto us —  browse through best practices in recruitment and you’re bound to find job ads that include a variation of the following:

Featuring one of these gives digital natives the impression that the job position has been thought out well and that the company offers a long term relationship where young employees can make an impact.

The paycheck is what we expect – purpose is what gets us excited!

Growing up in a digital environment has surely affected our job searching process.

I was curious about the experience my peers have had looking for their first job so I conducted a little research among a handful of graduate students, i.e. people who will join the job market in a month or two.

1. Digital natives are mobile-oriented

A stunning 9 out of 10 students I’ve talked to search for jobs on their smartphones. To my surprise, some of them don’t even own a PC!

2. Most of them aren’t on LinkedIn

Rest assured, we are not browsing ugly-looking, old school job boards. But what about popular, modern platforms and apps like LinkedIn? Surprisingly, they’re not a preferred choice when searching for employment either.

Actually, 7 out of 10 students I’ve talked to haven’t even opened LinkedIn for more than a year. It’s ‘way too professional’ for them. They are intimidated because of their lack of professional experience, so they don’t feel like they belong on LinkedIn yet.

In fact, there is no universal, go-to app/tool we use. But, there’s a place you can always find us – in the wasteland of social media.

3. Job offers are landing in their DMs

The competition for a good junior candidate has become so fierce that recruiters are now using digital marketing activities (originally used for targeting customers) to target potential candidates.

It’s called recruitment marketing and it has come to a point where the job literally finds you.

Although recruitment marketing is a topic in itself which I’m not going to delve into now, I would like to introduce one aspect of it— remarketing.

The term remarketing stands for the form of online advertising which enables websites to target website-related ads to users who have already visited it.

That’s correct, it’s possible to show your ads specifically to people who’ve previously visited your web. If you don’t already see how big this is, you will find out in a moment.

If you think about the perfect spot for targeting digital natives, there’s one place you can always find us–the social media.

On average, we spend 3 hours per day there, swiping endlessly, making social platforms the perfect place for recruiters to showcase their company and lure us to the company’s career pages.

Pro tip: The more discrete you are about it, the better the results.

Here are a few other ways you can raise awareness about your company among digital natives:

1) Don’t use social media only to promote job ads. Use it to promote your working environment, success stories, and educational content. That’s what will make us want to work for you and how you’ll become more tangible and real.

2) Visuals, visuals, visuals. A wall of text is what frightens us the most these days. Remember what I said about our attention? Environment we live in is highly graphical so for you to look good, your content must do the same.

3) Get straight to the point. Stories are cool, but we’ll rather read the entire Game of Thrones series than your 400-word job ad. I’ve mentioned earlier what our key motivators are, so emphasise those. You can add the rest to the job posting on your career site, but beware of information overload.

4) Improve your mobile UX. Career pages and job boards that are hard to navigate on mobile won’t capture a quarter of our 8-sec attention span. We also learned that 9 out of 10 young job seekers from my research used only smartphones in their job hunt, so build your digital strategy accordingly.

It’s a Sunday afternoon, I’m surfing the web and stumble upon an article about this successful Croatian IT company. It gets me curious so I decide to learn more about them. First stop—the company’s social media accounts.

I visit the official Instagram page and immediately see that the whole company went on a crazy team building somewhere at the seaside. “Wow…”, I think to myself, “…working here must be so cool. Let me check their careers page”.

Unfortunately, none of the open positions fit me. Regardlessly, I google the company again and read a couple more articles about their successful business ventures and the lauded company culture.

Fast forward a few weeks, it’s a Sunday afternoon again, I’m scrolling my Instagram feed (yet again), when suddenly BAM!
Junior Project Manager ad from the aforementioned IT company appears on my feed. I open the link to read the job description and think to myself:

“It’s definitely destined to be! I’m such a perfect fit for this ad, as if it had been written just for me!” (FYI it’s not destiny, it’s remarketing).

All this is to say we don’t even have to actively search for job opportunities anymore. Job ads are literally popping up here and there, fighting to grab potential candidates’ attention.

As far as the job ad description goes, there are a couple of things that hooked me immediately and gave me the impression I would do meaningful work if I joined this company.

Some of them were:

Hell, it even got me excited about writing a 2,000 word essay, an initial recruitment requirement.

Long story short, I got the Junior Project Manager job and over 6 months in, I can honestly say I’ve never been happier.

Social media is vital for recruiting digital natives. When thinking advertising, place your promotions strategically, make them visually attractive and capture attention with interesting, to-the-point content. With many recruiters still figuring this out, you are not too late to enter the race for top young talent, and if you play your car(d)s right, maybe even win it.