"IT" Vitebsk
Belarusian programmer is meme and legend
We are not much mistaken if we say that about 10% of the European and Russian software is written by Belarusians. Here and automation systems of banks and industrial enterprises, and software for ordinary users (such as the Viber messenger), and legendary games (such as World of Tanks). We are also part of this phenomenon (our BeSmart.net project is “spelled” in Belarusian Vitebsk), and we will briefly tell you where we have so many “techies” and what they are doing here.
Education
')
There are four state universities in Vitebsk, two of them are technical. In Vitebsk State University. P.M. Masherov has a department of applied mathematics. It produces good software engineers, people from there we jokingly call "primates" (among our employees, they also exist). There is also Vitebsk State Technological University or "techno- technology ". The Department of Applied Mathematics is also in it, but there is an additional education there, and the main specialty of the technicians from the “technologe” is design. All the designers in our team are from there.
Two other universities are technically far from the technology - this is Vitebsk State Academy of Veterinary Medicine and Vitebsk State Medical University. However, from there, oddly enough, come the programmers. We have a graduate from a medical university at BeSmart.net, and he is one of the best programmers in our team. He graduated from college, worked in the village, realized that medicine was not his hypostasis, and retrained.
Also in Vitebsk there is a branch of the Belarusian State University and several branches of private foreign universities, for example, from Lithuania. But the Polotsk State University , 100 km from Vitebsk, deserves special attention, young people from Vitebsk go there to study, and graduates come back to work. In Polotsk, a strong school: PSU teachers recruit teams for commercial projects already from third-year students and make software for them on order for the USA and Israel.
Every year Masherov University graduates about 50 "techies", Polotsk University - 200 "techies", and if you count all graduates from local universities who can create software, you will get about 300 people. Of these, two thirds go to work in their specialty - sysadmins, salespeople, managers. And of those who go to work in their specialty, half leave. In any case, every year in Vitebsk a hundred new “IT people” with higher education are added, not counting the specialists in “gland”, which are made by colleges. For a city with a population of 372 thousand people - this is quite a lot, but we didn’t meet all the unemployed programmers.
Geography
In Moscow, no one remembers about ADSL technology, and in Vitebsk, 90% of Internet users are connected using this technology, via telephone wires (while 3G, it seems to us, works faster than in Moscow). This fact predetermined the geography of "IT" Vitebsk. A few years ago there were only a few places where fiber was connected, "IT" companies settled there and traditionally continue to rent offices here now. The largest of these places of power are the Omega Trade and Office Center and the Golden Calf Cultural and Business Center .
Our office is located at Omega. It also houses the offices of EPAM (the largest employer in the IT market of Belarus) and the company Isida-Informatics (a manufacturer of control systems with a head office in St. Petersburg). EPAM does it slyly: they invite interns to themselves - capable students of 4-5 courses, and by the end of the training they have already reached junior developers and remain. It is prestigious to work in EPAM, and one of our friends went there from a small company for a lower salary, but more interesting projects. However, the turnover is large even in EPAM - programmers sometimes come from there, including to us, to ask if they need employees.
In the “Golden Calf” of large companies, for example, the local office of Artezio operates. And there are several groups of programmers who make software for foreign companies. These are small groups of outsourced programmers who gather, move, fall apart and gather again. For example, the next office in Omega was filmed by a group of guys who obviously did something for a customer from another time zone — they started work very early and finished too. After some time, they moved out and in their place the office of the Ukrainian candy factory Roshen unexpectedly opened, and we did not recognize the names of the company of our neighbors.
Partisans
A lot of Belarusians are dispersed around the world, and everyone has friends and university friends who are left. So it turns out that a person from the USA, Europe or Israel calls a friend in Vitebsk and says: “You need to write software! Will you do? ”He replies:“ I will! ”After that, the company of friends takes an apartment or small office somewhere, connects to the Internet, and the matter goes. The main part of the programmers in Vitebsk works in this way, and we call it “partisan”.
Among the "partisans" there are many branches of Western firms. The state has no questions for them, because what could be the questions for the company, whose leadership sits somewhere in America? For example, a company makes games for smartphones and puts them on Google Play. In the "contacts" on the site is indicated a business center in one of the American financial centers, but in general we are dealing with Vitebsk developers. Probably every programmer in Vitebsk has such "partisans" among friends, or he himself once "partisans."
State
In Vitebsk there were a lot of heavy machinery and metalworking enterprises since Soviet times, but now the “heavy duty” is bent. For example, the Vizas plant operates 2-3 days a week, another Vistan machine-tool plant is fully closed. But many state-owned enterprises of those times still work and various automation programs are written for them - for example, warehouse management programs. This is done by state design offices in prehistoric programming languages. These are unique places: there are salaries at the level of 2-2.5 million rubles ($ 200-250) and posters "To work not for fear, but for conscience!" One of our employees worked in a design bureau called PCB ACS , and he high level professional.
However, there are design offices owned by private individuals, for example, the Display Design Bureau , which is made by night-vision equipment and displays of radar systems for the military. By the way, we also lured away a good employee from the subsidiary of this design bureau.
The state is trying to rejuvenate the industry. Vitebsk has its own "Silicon Valley" - Small Business Incubator . His advertisement, decorated with national ornament, hangs in the center of Vitebsk. The state provides free of charge to IT sites and provides them with state orders and no. As far as we know, if orders are private, the contract is still not signed with the contractor, but with the incubator, that is, with the state, and the IT people are subcontractors and receive money from the state. We were invited to become residents of the incubator, but we politely refused.
Perspectives
There are no high-profile IT-related deals in Belarus in general, and in Vitebsk in particular. Here they try not to rattle unnecessarily. A case in point is the story of the Sipnet company, which openly stated that it is engaged in IP-telephony, without agreements with Beltelecom, the only telecom operator controlling all incoming and outgoing traffic from Belarus and back. Sipnet was blocked, and many other companies that did not protrude continued to work. In particular, in Vitebsk there are several call centers that work for Russian customers, use IP telephony and do not experience difficulties.
What do you need to organize a call center? Removable apartment, a dozen employees and the Internet (with him recently better - operators connect the whole streets). Such an improvised office may exist legally. When registering with the tax inspectorate, such small firms can specify something else as the Belarusian legislation allows entrepreneurs to engage in several types of business at once. Theoretically, all this can be done in Russia, but because of the difference in wages in Belarus is more profitable. Russian businessmen understand this, and in Vitebsk there are often cars with Russian numbers.
It is beneficial for Russian firms to open offices in Vitebsk for several reasons at once. The first is that the city is close to Russia, Latvia and Lithuania (where some Russian businessmen moved their legal entities). From Moscow on the M1 highway can be reached here in five hours - faster than in most Russian regions. Rental prices vary at times, there are no traffic jams, and a lot of things can be redone in a day. The city is also convenient for traveling around the world: Vilnius is 270 km away, from where you can fly anywhere for $ 70-100 by plane of a low-cost airline airline.
In general, Vitebsk is one of the largest Belarusian IT outsourcing centers. It has everything for comfortable work, both entrepreneurs and programmers. Although it looks like it is a quiet provincial town where nothing happens (except for the festival “Slavic Bazaar” , of course), and it is accepted to work here without fanfare.
We are not much mistaken if we say that about 10% of the European and Russian software is written by Belarusians. Here and automation systems of banks and industrial enterprises, and software for ordinary users (such as the Viber messenger), and legendary games (such as World of Tanks). We are also part of this phenomenon (our BeSmart.net project is “spelled” in Belarusian Vitebsk), and we will briefly tell you where we have so many “techies” and what they are doing here.
Education
')
There are four state universities in Vitebsk, two of them are technical. In Vitebsk State University. P.M. Masherov has a department of applied mathematics. It produces good software engineers, people from there we jokingly call "primates" (among our employees, they also exist). There is also Vitebsk State Technological University or "techno- technology ". The Department of Applied Mathematics is also in it, but there is an additional education there, and the main specialty of the technicians from the “technologe” is design. All the designers in our team are from there.
Two other universities are technically far from the technology - this is Vitebsk State Academy of Veterinary Medicine and Vitebsk State Medical University. However, from there, oddly enough, come the programmers. We have a graduate from a medical university at BeSmart.net, and he is one of the best programmers in our team. He graduated from college, worked in the village, realized that medicine was not his hypostasis, and retrained.
Also in Vitebsk there is a branch of the Belarusian State University and several branches of private foreign universities, for example, from Lithuania. But the Polotsk State University , 100 km from Vitebsk, deserves special attention, young people from Vitebsk go there to study, and graduates come back to work. In Polotsk, a strong school: PSU teachers recruit teams for commercial projects already from third-year students and make software for them on order for the USA and Israel.
Every year Masherov University graduates about 50 "techies", Polotsk University - 200 "techies", and if you count all graduates from local universities who can create software, you will get about 300 people. Of these, two thirds go to work in their specialty - sysadmins, salespeople, managers. And of those who go to work in their specialty, half leave. In any case, every year in Vitebsk a hundred new “IT people” with higher education are added, not counting the specialists in “gland”, which are made by colleges. For a city with a population of 372 thousand people - this is quite a lot, but we didn’t meet all the unemployed programmers.
Geography
In Moscow, no one remembers about ADSL technology, and in Vitebsk, 90% of Internet users are connected using this technology, via telephone wires (while 3G, it seems to us, works faster than in Moscow). This fact predetermined the geography of "IT" Vitebsk. A few years ago there were only a few places where fiber was connected, "IT" companies settled there and traditionally continue to rent offices here now. The largest of these places of power are the Omega Trade and Office Center and the Golden Calf Cultural and Business Center .
Our office is located at Omega. It also houses the offices of EPAM (the largest employer in the IT market of Belarus) and the company Isida-Informatics (a manufacturer of control systems with a head office in St. Petersburg). EPAM does it slyly: they invite interns to themselves - capable students of 4-5 courses, and by the end of the training they have already reached junior developers and remain. It is prestigious to work in EPAM, and one of our friends went there from a small company for a lower salary, but more interesting projects. However, the turnover is large even in EPAM - programmers sometimes come from there, including to us, to ask if they need employees.
In the “Golden Calf” of large companies, for example, the local office of Artezio operates. And there are several groups of programmers who make software for foreign companies. These are small groups of outsourced programmers who gather, move, fall apart and gather again. For example, the next office in Omega was filmed by a group of guys who obviously did something for a customer from another time zone — they started work very early and finished too. After some time, they moved out and in their place the office of the Ukrainian candy factory Roshen unexpectedly opened, and we did not recognize the names of the company of our neighbors.
Partisans
A lot of Belarusians are dispersed around the world, and everyone has friends and university friends who are left. So it turns out that a person from the USA, Europe or Israel calls a friend in Vitebsk and says: “You need to write software! Will you do? ”He replies:“ I will! ”After that, the company of friends takes an apartment or small office somewhere, connects to the Internet, and the matter goes. The main part of the programmers in Vitebsk works in this way, and we call it “partisan”.
Among the "partisans" there are many branches of Western firms. The state has no questions for them, because what could be the questions for the company, whose leadership sits somewhere in America? For example, a company makes games for smartphones and puts them on Google Play. In the "contacts" on the site is indicated a business center in one of the American financial centers, but in general we are dealing with Vitebsk developers. Probably every programmer in Vitebsk has such "partisans" among friends, or he himself once "partisans."
State
In Vitebsk there were a lot of heavy machinery and metalworking enterprises since Soviet times, but now the “heavy duty” is bent. For example, the Vizas plant operates 2-3 days a week, another Vistan machine-tool plant is fully closed. But many state-owned enterprises of those times still work and various automation programs are written for them - for example, warehouse management programs. This is done by state design offices in prehistoric programming languages. These are unique places: there are salaries at the level of 2-2.5 million rubles ($ 200-250) and posters "To work not for fear, but for conscience!" One of our employees worked in a design bureau called PCB ACS , and he high level professional.
However, there are design offices owned by private individuals, for example, the Display Design Bureau , which is made by night-vision equipment and displays of radar systems for the military. By the way, we also lured away a good employee from the subsidiary of this design bureau.
The state is trying to rejuvenate the industry. Vitebsk has its own "Silicon Valley" - Small Business Incubator . His advertisement, decorated with national ornament, hangs in the center of Vitebsk. The state provides free of charge to IT sites and provides them with state orders and no. As far as we know, if orders are private, the contract is still not signed with the contractor, but with the incubator, that is, with the state, and the IT people are subcontractors and receive money from the state. We were invited to become residents of the incubator, but we politely refused.
Perspectives
There are no high-profile IT-related deals in Belarus in general, and in Vitebsk in particular. Here they try not to rattle unnecessarily. A case in point is the story of the Sipnet company, which openly stated that it is engaged in IP-telephony, without agreements with Beltelecom, the only telecom operator controlling all incoming and outgoing traffic from Belarus and back. Sipnet was blocked, and many other companies that did not protrude continued to work. In particular, in Vitebsk there are several call centers that work for Russian customers, use IP telephony and do not experience difficulties.
What do you need to organize a call center? Removable apartment, a dozen employees and the Internet (with him recently better - operators connect the whole streets). Such an improvised office may exist legally. When registering with the tax inspectorate, such small firms can specify something else as the Belarusian legislation allows entrepreneurs to engage in several types of business at once. Theoretically, all this can be done in Russia, but because of the difference in wages in Belarus is more profitable. Russian businessmen understand this, and in Vitebsk there are often cars with Russian numbers.
It is beneficial for Russian firms to open offices in Vitebsk for several reasons at once. The first is that the city is close to Russia, Latvia and Lithuania (where some Russian businessmen moved their legal entities). From Moscow on the M1 highway can be reached here in five hours - faster than in most Russian regions. Rental prices vary at times, there are no traffic jams, and a lot of things can be redone in a day. The city is also convenient for traveling around the world: Vilnius is 270 km away, from where you can fly anywhere for $ 70-100 by plane of a low-cost airline airline.
In general, Vitebsk is one of the largest Belarusian IT outsourcing centers. It has everything for comfortable work, both entrepreneurs and programmers. Although it looks like it is a quiet provincial town where nothing happens (except for the festival “Slavic Bazaar” , of course), and it is accepted to work here without fanfare.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/242907/
All Articles