Success Stories

ST6: The untraditional company that wants to invest in Bulgarian IT talent

"We are a self-management company - we don't have managers or bosses, and each ST6er is empowered to make decisions for the organization," shared our partners from ST6.

Wait, no managers, no bosses?

Yes, ST6 has a fascinating organizational structure that enables complete transparency. As a result, the company has become one of the most profitable businesses within its sector in Bulgaria. Still, not a single employee had left the company since its start 4.5 years ago.



The team only keeps growing. "We are trying to build an environment where it's okay to fail, but learn your lessons therefore grow." 

Well, we were eager to learn more about ST6, the #noboss type of company, but most importantly - the role of junior talent in its plans. 

"An organization of the future"

ST6's mission is to "find companies with big technological challenges and help them solve them with well-crafted software," as the team explained to us. The company delivers bespoke software solutions and consultancy to its clients to develop end-to-end solutions to help them grow their business.

The company was born of the belief that great people build outstanding products. But this would be possible only if those great and talented people were in the proper environment - a place where they would feel empowered to put in their best work and "leave a piece of their hearts."

As a continuation of this belief, ST6 follows social technology guides for evolving and resilient organizations - Sociocracy 3.0 and Holacracy for building organizations of the future.

"Unlike traditional organizations, we are organized in circles instead of departments. We often say that here every one is an acting CEO."

To do that, each employee has all the information that typically is available only to C-level executives, including financial performance (revenue, profit, expenses), pricing and customer offers, salaries and equity - quite literary all the information and everything related to the company.

"In addition to knowing how much everyone in the organization earns, everyone is also empowered to decide their salary - a process called self-set salaries. Since you are your boss, it only makes sense that you and only you will be able to decide how much you will get paid."

So, how is the company organized? Into circles with each having its own domain, accountabilities, members, meetings, roles, assigned people into the roles, Trello board, meeting notes, and Slack channel.

In case that an ST6's employee feels that their skills would be more suitable for another circle, they can transfer. Such a change is facilitated by another interesting practice, part of the transparency policy - sharing notes after each meeting. 

"This allows for full awareness throughout the organization about all dynamics, discussions, and decisions," explained the ST6 team.

The proudest moment

The ST6 organizational structure sounds so exciting, and we haven't seen many Bulgarian companies implementing these principles in such a successful way. It's not a surprise that the team sees this as one of their most significant achievements, which "enables self-organization and full transparency with our company," as summarized by ST6.

"The result is that our people churn rate 0 since we started our organization 4.5 years ago. Not only is our organizational structure phenomenal for our team members, but it's also great for business: we've now become one of the most profitable businesses within our sector in Bulgaria."  

Growing junior talents

"We are trying to build an environment where it' okay to fail, but learn your lessons, therefore grow. Which is an excellent environment for junior people," explained the ST6 team.

An essential part of the environment is the senior people who can support juniors' professional growth. And ST6 has a lot of that. "We believe wisdom comes with experience."

The partnership with Telerik Academy

"Telerik Academy has proven itself to be the leader in IT education in Bulgaria. Our goal is to invest in the growth of talent in Bulgaria, and the Academy is the best way to do that."

We share a mutual vision with ST6. They have "directly experienced the value Telerik Academy brings to you talent," adding that many of their team members are Telerik Academy alumni, and several have taught courses here.

Trends, shaping the ST6 line of work

We are always eager to ask our partners about the trends that shape their area of work at the moment.

Well, ST6 shared some exciting insights about two companies among their partners - MacStadium and MarkForged.

MacStadium is the only cloud provider to support and scale virtualization solutions on Mac hardware. In addition to offering private clouds built on VMware and Anka, MacStadium created Orka, the first and only solution for orchestrating macOS in a cloud environment for Apple development on Apple hardware.

"We partner with MacStadium as part of the Orka and Customer Portal teams. We help them by establishing the best practices in project management, software architecture and software development," explained ST6.

MarkForged is a company that designs, develops, and manufacturer The Digital Forge - an industrial platform of 3D printers, software, and materials that enable manufacturers to print parts at the point of need. ST6 helps the company with the software, which manages 3D printer farms and controls what gets printed, where, and when.

What's next for ST6? Here's the answer

"Our goal is to build our own product and create the next unicorn startup in Bulgaria," shared from ST6, who is ready to solve every challenge, no matter how big or small, together - as a team.

To achieve their ambitious goals, ST6 plans to extend its engineering team and, along with this, to keep evolving "into an even more self-managed and human-loving organization with an evolutionary purpose."

"We're in constant search of new ST6ers to join our team due to the increased demand for our services. We're also at the beginning of our big journey to create our own product, which will need more quality talent."

Are you looking to jumpstart your career in IT? Find out more about our Telerik Academy Alpha programs. Are you a company seeking Master Junior talent? Then go through our business page or contact us directly. 

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