ZeptoLab started building a corporate university
Pre-New Year greetings to all haberdashers reading us!
2014 was a busy and difficult year for us, but at the same time it was also the most innovative and instructive.
Budgets for training in our difficult times, unfortunately, suffer more than others in the corporate environment, but we are pleased to be an exception to this rule: every employee of Zeptolab has always had and has a budget for training of about 90,000 rubles. in year.
From this budget, zeptolabovtsy can attend conferences, go to trainings and courses both inside and outside the company, as well as study online. At conferences, our guys often act as speakers:
')
In order to move up the professional and career ladder, sometimes the amount of knowledge that you come to the company with is not a long-term commitment to new heights. And when employees have such a desire, you can and should work with it. I want to share how we do it.
This year we were faced with the task of systematically approaching the development of the most necessary skills of the company's employees. To begin with, it was worth highlighting them - we did this in a standard way, by evaluating personnel and individual conversations with department heads.
After the “gaps” in knowledge, which are not from one or two employees, but from entire departments, became clear, we set to work in full. Individual nuances were mainly worked out at external courses and trainings, and those that turned out to be more global worked within the company all together.
Naturally, the aforementioned concerns both the elaboration of professional skills and the so-called soft skills: for example, all those who were important to learn to communicate their ideas to colleagues and subordinates in an intelligible manner, underwent a course of public speaking.
Any individual external course or training from Zeptolab can be accessed in two ways: on the recommendation of the head or HR-department, as well as on their own initiative. If an employee finds any super course in the same British woman or even in another company at the Yandex level, and this course, in his own opinion, can help him work more efficiently - well.
We will tell a little more about group courses that we launched inside the company this year. When it became clear what courses and for whom are needed, the task arose of finding who will lead them. Everything is simple: if the necessary expertise was inside Zepto, then the course was asked to hold someone from the staff, if not, they were looking for a strong teacher outside of Zeptolab on the recommendations.
If there was no necessary expertise inside the company, it was much more efficient and cheaper to invite a standing teacher on the necessary topics directly to the company. In this case, you can agree on a convenient date for everyone, and the time and effort that is usually spent on transport can be spent on training. The courses were open, and besides the target audience, any interested employee could get there + we record and store all the lectures in our knowledge library, where they can be found at any time.
Here is what we spent inside Septolab this year:
For the whole company:
For the art department:
Teachers were invited from BUSHD, Real Time School, as well as free artists in every sense of the word.
For developers:
Given the target audience of Habrahabr - about the last course in a little more detail:
Currently, more than half of all Zeptolab developers (client and server) are enrolled in the course.
The course does not mean the simplest homework: you have to think about them, but after the solution “comes”, the code is written in 10-15 minutes.
At codeforces.ru, Zeptolabovtsy has a closed group, and that's where it all happens. Homework done in the form of special competitions with a few differences from the classic. Interested - details here .
Periodically inside the company there are contests among programmers, after which ratings are built and gifts are given.
The whole course is divided into 4 blocks:
From the results of the course: after one of our first contest on Codeforces.ru, one of our client developers received a rating of 1,700, which had not been involved in sports programming before.
Some more statistics: the last homework (I must say, one of the most difficult) is able to accomplish in about 2 hours approximately 1,500 people worldwide. Three of them work for us.
On the results of the Head of Client Development ZeptoLab course, Victor responds as follows: “In the company's code, a sensible use of standard data structures has appeared, and performance issues are increasingly being raised. Who wants to apply the knowledge gained in the work - does it. There is always an opportunity to fix and apply them in work. Of course, the level of developers has become much higher, but there is always room to grow. ”
The plans for the next year are to finish learning algorithms and go on to learning patterns, as well as in-depth study of modern C ++ (since our internal framework is written in this language and the lion's part of the code is written).
In addition, in addition to academic courses, the company has a so-called “Developers' exp share” - regular meetings for the exchange of purely practical experience for developers. For these meetings, speakers prepare presentations with their own solutions to typical work situations and problems, and also share their suggestions for further development of the framework and the entire development process.
Well, a little bit about happiness when there are people within the company who have the necessary knowledge and knowledge.
Courses from employees working for you are useful for two reasons. First, it is an exchange of expertise, and with the maximum applicable to your company. Secondly, this is a chance for your employee to once again structure his own knowledge in his head and learn something somewhere while he is preparing for a lecture. Plus, many people find this way of self-realization.
This year, the following courses were launched in the pilot version:
It should be noted that such courses need to be run inside the company carefully (as well as choosing the leader of this course itself, because the leader and the students already have established working relationships), and the principle “do no harm” will be as useful as possible here, because people still work together :)
There is one more pleasant moment in group training within the company - brothers in arms from different departments or from different projects very rarely overlap in work, and with a well-organized course from a strong trainer, they get the opportunity to perfectly interact with each other - this is your team building and training. . The Zeptolabov people in chorus note that this is one of the most significant "advantages" of such courses, and that they learned some things from each other no less than in the course itself.
Plus it charges and adds variety to the workflow :)
If we talk about numbers, this year we invested about 3 million rubles in the education of Zeptolabovtsy. On this we are not going to stop, we will only gain momentum. There are plans to exchange experience with our Western GameDev colleagues (for example, in the first half of the year we are preparing a course for game designers and product managers from Ernest Adams , a fairly well-known consultant in the gaming industry).
And I also want to share my experience + further, we are absolutely open to advice, therefore, dear colleagues in the gaming and IT industries, if you have something to share - non-standard approaches to learning or just useful knowledge sources (including courses, online webinars, etc.) - leave in the comments, we will be grateful (and, we hope, not only we).
At this wave ZeptoLab FM stops broadcasting on the Habrahabr blog in 2014, and in 2015 we hope to please the world with the fruits of our efforts in the form, of course, of new games from ZeptoLab. Apparently, you are waiting for them)
Happy New Year and cool New Year holidays!
Your ZeptoTeam.
2014 was a busy and difficult year for us, but at the same time it was also the most innovative and instructive.
Budgets for training in our difficult times, unfortunately, suffer more than others in the corporate environment, but we are pleased to be an exception to this rule: every employee of Zeptolab has always had and has a budget for training of about 90,000 rubles. in year.
From this budget, zeptolabovtsy can attend conferences, go to trainings and courses both inside and outside the company, as well as study online. At conferences, our guys often act as speakers:
')
In order to move up the professional and career ladder, sometimes the amount of knowledge that you come to the company with is not a long-term commitment to new heights. And when employees have such a desire, you can and should work with it. I want to share how we do it.
This year we were faced with the task of systematically approaching the development of the most necessary skills of the company's employees. To begin with, it was worth highlighting them - we did this in a standard way, by evaluating personnel and individual conversations with department heads.
After the “gaps” in knowledge, which are not from one or two employees, but from entire departments, became clear, we set to work in full. Individual nuances were mainly worked out at external courses and trainings, and those that turned out to be more global worked within the company all together.
Naturally, the aforementioned concerns both the elaboration of professional skills and the so-called soft skills: for example, all those who were important to learn to communicate their ideas to colleagues and subordinates in an intelligible manner, underwent a course of public speaking.
Any individual external course or training from Zeptolab can be accessed in two ways: on the recommendation of the head or HR-department, as well as on their own initiative. If an employee finds any super course in the same British woman or even in another company at the Yandex level, and this course, in his own opinion, can help him work more efficiently - well.
We will tell a little more about group courses that we launched inside the company this year. When it became clear what courses and for whom are needed, the task arose of finding who will lead them. Everything is simple: if the necessary expertise was inside Zepto, then the course was asked to hold someone from the staff, if not, they were looking for a strong teacher outside of Zeptolab on the recommendations.
If there was no necessary expertise inside the company, it was much more efficient and cheaper to invite a standing teacher on the necessary topics directly to the company. In this case, you can agree on a convenient date for everyone, and the time and effort that is usually spent on transport can be spent on training. The courses were open, and besides the target audience, any interested employee could get there + we record and store all the lectures in our knowledge library, where they can be found at any time.
Here is what we spent inside Septolab this year:
For the whole company:
- Practical course on time management and motivation
For the art department:
- Color Theory Course
- Workshop on Motion Design,
- Workshop on UI.
Teachers were invited from BUSHD, Real Time School, as well as free artists in every sense of the word.
For developers:
- A course on algorithms from Mikhail Mirzayanov (creator of Codeforces)
Given the target audience of Habrahabr - about the last course in a little more detail:
Currently, more than half of all Zeptolab developers (client and server) are enrolled in the course.
The course does not mean the simplest homework: you have to think about them, but after the solution “comes”, the code is written in 10-15 minutes.
At codeforces.ru, Zeptolabovtsy has a closed group, and that's where it all happens. Homework done in the form of special competitions with a few differences from the classic. Interested - details here .
Periodically inside the company there are contests among programmers, after which ratings are built and gifts are given.
The whole course is divided into 4 blocks:
- The first block is a heap, Fenwick tree, stacks, queues, sparse table, root Heuristics, hashes, sorting
- The second block - sorting (continued), two pointers, binary and ternary searches, segment tree, treap, treap by implicit key
- The third block is dynamic programming: classical methods, DP by a broken edge, DP by bitmask
- Graph theory and probability theory
From the results of the course: after one of our first contest on Codeforces.ru, one of our client developers received a rating of 1,700, which had not been involved in sports programming before.
Some more statistics: the last homework (I must say, one of the most difficult) is able to accomplish in about 2 hours approximately 1,500 people worldwide. Three of them work for us.
On the results of the Head of Client Development ZeptoLab course, Victor responds as follows: “In the company's code, a sensible use of standard data structures has appeared, and performance issues are increasingly being raised. Who wants to apply the knowledge gained in the work - does it. There is always an opportunity to fix and apply them in work. Of course, the level of developers has become much higher, but there is always room to grow. ”
The plans for the next year are to finish learning algorithms and go on to learning patterns, as well as in-depth study of modern C ++ (since our internal framework is written in this language and the lion's part of the code is written).
In addition, in addition to academic courses, the company has a so-called “Developers' exp share” - regular meetings for the exchange of purely practical experience for developers. For these meetings, speakers prepare presentations with their own solutions to typical work situations and problems, and also share their suggestions for further development of the framework and the entire development process.
Well, a little bit about happiness when there are people within the company who have the necessary knowledge and knowledge.
Courses from employees working for you are useful for two reasons. First, it is an exchange of expertise, and with the maximum applicable to your company. Secondly, this is a chance for your employee to once again structure his own knowledge in his head and learn something somewhere while he is preparing for a lecture. Plus, many people find this way of self-realization.
This year, the following courses were launched in the pilot version:
- For QA department - a course from the leading iOS developer (coming from QA, by the way), aimed at the ability to independently build, profile and debug the build using Xcode tools, and also to know the architecture of the framework for analytic problem search
- For game designers, periodical meetings with analysts, where the analytics department shared the gaming market trends with their eyes, as well as with the cunning tools of the same MS Excel
- For everyone, it’s a purely practical course from Head of PMO to simplify everyday life: here it’s about prioritization, and not about the most famous, but useful functions of mail and calendar, etc.
It should be noted that such courses need to be run inside the company carefully (as well as choosing the leader of this course itself, because the leader and the students already have established working relationships), and the principle “do no harm” will be as useful as possible here, because people still work together :)
There is one more pleasant moment in group training within the company - brothers in arms from different departments or from different projects very rarely overlap in work, and with a well-organized course from a strong trainer, they get the opportunity to perfectly interact with each other - this is your team building and training. . The Zeptolabov people in chorus note that this is one of the most significant "advantages" of such courses, and that they learned some things from each other no less than in the course itself.
Plus it charges and adds variety to the workflow :)
If we talk about numbers, this year we invested about 3 million rubles in the education of Zeptolabovtsy. On this we are not going to stop, we will only gain momentum. There are plans to exchange experience with our Western GameDev colleagues (for example, in the first half of the year we are preparing a course for game designers and product managers from Ernest Adams , a fairly well-known consultant in the gaming industry).
And I also want to share my experience + further, we are absolutely open to advice, therefore, dear colleagues in the gaming and IT industries, if you have something to share - non-standard approaches to learning or just useful knowledge sources (including courses, online webinars, etc.) - leave in the comments, we will be grateful (and, we hope, not only we).
At this wave ZeptoLab FM stops broadcasting on the Habrahabr blog in 2014, and in 2015 we hope to please the world with the fruits of our efforts in the form, of course, of new games from ZeptoLab. Apparently, you are waiting for them)
Happy New Year and cool New Year holidays!
Your ZeptoTeam.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/246407/
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