1 year in ABBYY: Part 1 - Job Search and First Impressions

Good day to all. I hope you remember me in the story about the inner “kitchen” of the mobile app development for the Games in Sochi-2014 . After the end of the Games, I often received questions about where and how I got settled, whether I like the experience and experience of such a large project, so I decided to dedicate a separate post to this story: it can be useful to those who are at a crossroads or just starting their career way.

In my opinion, the history of finding and finding work is strongly lacking in Habré, but this is a very important question. With all the love of creative professionals for their business, entrepreneurship and start-ups, working in an excellent company allows you to strengthen a lot of competencies, increase skills in almost all aspects of business and generally give the opportunity to communicate with excellent people from different areas for free / without SMS.

Work searches

About a month before the end of the Olympics in Sochi and the termination of the contract, I, like all the other specialists of the Organizing Committee, began to slowly look for work. Since practically everybody had a problem of employment, quite interesting career seminars, “lessons”, personal consultations and “looks” of top partners and simply wishing to profit by carefully selected Sochi personnel were organized for everyone.


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Unfortunately, there were not so many offers on IT. There were also dreams to go to the Olympic construction sites in Brazil at Rio 2016 or Pyeongchang 2018, at least Baku 2015, but the wife didn’t hurt too much in all these strange ways, and our competencies and inquiries didn’t suit them very much.

As a result, began to look for work on the open market. Since I myself, I repeat, from Krasnodar, got used to the sun and the sea, first of all I began to look for work in the Krasnodar region. Unfortunately, for the whole month of intensive searches, there was only one vacancy of a mobile project manager in a cafe ... As a result, the main offers that interested were from Moscow. I applied for more or less suitable vacancies on Apple.com and Google.com (they called from Apple, talked to HR from London for a long time, but then everything went quiet) and began to monitor work sites.

In principle, there were a lot of offers from mobile and good IT companies on mobile topics. Created several filters by keywords and reviewed the added ones daily. I responded to suitable and interesting ones, wrote a covering letter that I could and why I wanted to work for them, and waited for an answer. A cover letter is always very important and gives you the opportunity to more fully describe yourself and your usefulness. In any case, if you really want to work for a company and it has a job opportunity that suits you, a cover letter from a pure heart is a must. By the way, good stuff on this topic .

Test items

Most often, the next step was to make a test task. There were a lot of test tasks (apparently, everyone already slowly learned to screen out inadequate candidates thanks to them), and more often situational or careful planning. A few examples:

• Given several descriptions of future features, you need to paint a rough schedule, describe the risks and ways to reduce them;
• Given the current implementation of some features. It is necessary to consider how to develop the functional, how to confirm this hypothesis (what kind of research, what is from analytics, etc.);
• Write TK for a subsystem sufficient for transfer to production. Perform decomposition of the task, make a project plan;
• The company has a conflict between testers and developers (details are described). Who is to blame and what to do?
• In the last release, the API of social networks broke, and the next release of the application only a week later. What to do?
• There is an example interface. It is necessary to describe the elements, highlight problem areas, describe how to fix, and send a description of the tasks for the designer and developer.

Sometimes there was just a series of questions on adequacy in the style of “describe the necessary team for developing an application”, “when flexible methodologies are applicable, and when not”. As a result, each answer often took from 1 to 4 hours, which, given active work on the Paralympic Games, and on duty was quite annoying. But since I, in general, am a fan of solving various problems, the time has been.

Job interviews

Then there was a series of interviews. During the Sochi stage it was Skype conversations. And sometimes right after duty (that is, in a bright form and with sleepy eyes, I imagine the surprise of HRs) or, for example, trips to objects (thanks to 4G from Megaphone, frankly). In general, I think people had funny video broadcasts. But it seems like everything went well.



In the end, after a series of interviews, I left for myself 3 companies in which I really wanted to work on the interestingness and ambitiousness of the tasks and the maximum applicability of my competencies. One of them was ABBYY. I ran into the company's mobile products on the first MDDAY, in 2010 , where I flew to a completely green android programmer, barely scrapping the air ticket. It was really cool to see a top software company with interesting products like ABBYY Business Card Reader or ABBYY TextGrabber on only emerging mobile platforms.

Practically all the companies from my top three offered VHI, a gym, training courses in the office, a free (different degrees of freedom) schedule. Apparently, now it is some kind of mandatory minimum for IT-Schnick. From what I noted on the job description at ABBYY, the compensation for renting a house (as it turned out later, depends on the cost of rent and the amount of salary), a really good choice of courses in languages, children's room (more on that later).

Offices

The location of the offices differed quite strongly. One company has a good and expensive place in the center, the other two have a little further away. I used to work (and lived for some time) on Polyanka, and, of course, the advantage of having cafes, cinemas, points of issuing orders for online stores, historical sites and parks nearby was very attractive. "Sleeping bags", on the one hand, frightened, on the other - it was possible to rent a house next to work and walk on foot (or on a scooter, which I did).

There were several interviews at each potential workplace, with specialists at various levels, and, in general, they were pretty favorable and positive almost everywhere. Offices, by the way, many IT-companies are unusually cool! Articles and photo stories do not convey this.

It was not so convenient to get to ABBYY from the metro station “Otradnoe” (north, gray branch), you needed an entrance through the checkpoint to get the ordered pass, then another 5 minutes to go - and we got into the 7-storey building with the letter “P” with parking for bicycles .





At that time I didn’t read the office reviews from blogger Sergei Mukhamedov and Village (look, they are cool), so when I got to the building I was very skeptical. Traditional workplaces are cubicles, HR negotiations were rather ordinary at that time, the “high-throughput” system.



But the devil, as usual, was in the details.
Firstly, the dining room on the ground floor was excellent. Sorry for such “basic” needs, but what I eat, I watch, I try to adhere to vegetarianism and I treat the quality of products together with the price carefully. Somehow, I didn't want to eat lunchboxes. The dining room came to taste for me, my wife, and even my son when they came to visit.

Secondly, that which none of the “competitors” had had was a children's playroom. While we are standing in line at the kindergarten (yes, in Moscow it is still a huge problem) and we go to the “development”, the nursery has become a salvation a couple of times a week. You bring me to work in the morning, have lunch with your child, go home in the evening. There he is interested, there are often other kids - in general, everything is fine.



Thirdly, negotiations and the whole office turned out to be with “hidden pearls”. For example, the talks are all different and are decorated in different styles: snow, library, board games, oriental hall, "with a turtle", a large conference room. It is immediately evident that the situation was created with soul and care.





There is a gym + a hall with mirrors for group programs, table tennis, massage, a massage chair, a doctor in the office, table football, consoles, ottomans, equipped kitchens.



In general, it is nice to be. In the personnel department in general, you can ride in a hammock



Fourthly, that my ecological consciousness has finally “finished off” is boxes for collecting things for processing and transfer to charity. I was extremely happy when I managed to hand over the accumulated for the long life of the battery in “Mediamarkt”, when they began to accept them. But the killed energy-saving ones were still dead weight and waited in the wings, as they are received in few places (by the way, here is the actual link on the Greenpeace website ). And here I see a working mechanism right next to the workplace! Just a respect to all who made such a decision!





About charity is also a special conversation. Here you can really give things, household appliances, make a contribution, become a volunteer, help children and adults. Even the Ice Bucket Challenge was taken seriously and instead of dousing they provided real help to a person with this disease.



Well, compensation also got hooked: compensation for sports activities, literature purchases, corporate mobile communication tariffs, insurance discounts, rental housing compensation, material assistance in important life situations, even partial payment of a nanny for an employee's child!

Somehow I have been very crucified about any “buns”, which, perhaps, it seems that only because of some “tablets with smoothies” ABBYY could have been chosen. Absolutely not. And the team, and management, and schedule, and responsibilities, and opportunities immediately arranged completely. But all the other moments were so strikingly different for the better that sometimes you wonder what all this is in a real Russian company.

The only thing that I personally somehow lacked was the feeling of such a “mover” and start-up. That is, the company has been on the market for a long time, the processes are working well, many different systems and libraries have been created, many tools have been tried, everyone is used to them and there is no place to hurry - we are moving forward steadily. Move this large object in some other direction, use another task manager, or move away from SVN, for example, seemed like some kind of inhuman task.

But in the end, without much thought, I accepted the offer from ABBYY and became the product manager of the ABBYY Business Card Reader family. And the next day after going to work was my birthday (exactly one year today).

But about this, the processes of work in the company, as well as the terrible secret that only employees know - in the next series .