The company offers car hire by smart phone, and has grown to become a giant enterprise in only five years.
Uber started its activities by offering the hire of chauffeur-driven luxury cars, and today its services are accessible to customers in 45 countries and over 100 cities. In 2012, the company introduced the hire of more economical chauffeur-driven cars to the market, and so started competing with the taxi business.
Mr Oliver Nicholas, who is staying in Vilnius at the moment, is a software engineer responsible for key infrastructure teams in both the USA and Lithuania.
“We have a team of three persons in Lithuania. They are software engineers. We’ve been working with them for some time, but our third team member joined us only a week ago. I must admit they’re among the best software engineers we collaborate with,” Mr Nicholas told DELFI.
“We didn’t search for employees in Lithuania deliberately. We have a Lithuanian co-worker on the team in San Francisco. He told us that he had friends in Lithuania who were excellent engineers and it was worth talking to them. So we talked to them and decided to employ them. They didn’t want to go to work in the USA, but we saw that they were skilled professionals, and so we decided to have a team in Lithuania,” Mr Nicholas said.
Step by step, the company has started looking for more staff members: interviews are taking place with potential employees, employment agencies, and Invest Lithuania.
“We’re satisfied with the experience of our work in Lithuania: we work with clever, highly-skilled people. We enjoy working with them,” Mr Nicholas said.
According to Nicolas, Uber liked the level of both education and experience the software engineers employed in Lithuania have.
“Some of our employees in Lithuania had started their own businesses and have also had the experience of working with other start-ups. So their experience is diverse indeed,” Mr Nicholas stated.
The professionals working for Uber in Lithuania are 27−30 years old and have several years of work experience.
“We’ve also had the experience of working with a 23-year-old guy. He’s one of our most professional employees. We like employing both university graduates – who have just finished university and are very enthusiastic and enjoy learning – and experienced specialists who know the mistakes to be avoided and how to create added value in accordance with tried and tested ideas,” Mr Nicholas continued.
“In the start-up business, you never know what will succeed. Two years ago, Uber had 100 employees. Today we have 1,600. So I have the impression that we are still in the early stages of the growth of information technologies. In my opinion, the IT sector will keep growing because there are so many fields that will definitely wish to get on the Internet and apply computer technologies in their business. The most important thing for those wanting to work in the IT field is to be educated and to know both technology and mathematics, and have good analysing skills. I don’t think that the growth of the IT sector will decrease in the nearest future,” Mr Nicholas said.
According to him, the most important thing is for a person to strive to be not just a good specialist, but the best specialist irrespective of the career field chosen.
“In my opinion it’s a very important principle, and it’s worth applying in one’s job if a person wants to succeed,” Mr Nicholas concluded.
Translated by Invest Lithuania
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