Our development centers around the country with "teleports" to any city

Typical workplace: two monitors, travel laptop, lamp, Internet

We have a lot of work in development, and not all of it requires a presence in Moscow, and not all developers can be easily found in the capital. Therefore, the principle is quite simple: we find developers in a city where they like to live, we remove a good and conveniently located office there and just send the tasks. Communication on the network, food in the nearest restaurant by subscription. And everyone is happy. We - by getting “heads” that are not in Moscow, at city prices (the difference with Moscow fully pays for the rent of the office), and developers can work in their own way and travel around the country.


Tester in Irkutsk
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"Teleports" are made like this: you can go to any other such development center for 4 weeks for a trial to work there. With preservation of salary, and another hotel and meals - at the expense of the company. If the “home port” is Moscow, then, moving to another office, one must also read the seminar.

The projects over which they work are distributed throughout the country - from automation of nuclear power plants to various applied software "Lenta", Moscow City Court, Rosstat, and so on.

In total, we now have 7 such centers - from a small office for 5 people in a business center to a large regional team of 30 developers and testers. But, of course, historically, while most of all developers and testers in Moscow are about 250 people (this is one of the largest departments at CROC). However, soon the percentage of workers in other cities threatens to get closer to half. The geography is quite extensive: Moscow (including a separate small office in Troitsk), Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara, Irkutsk, Perm, Krasnodar.

About centers in general

As a rule, these are offices in class B + business centers with security, a reception, a canteen or several cafes where we pay for meals. Somewhere there is already a tennis table and simulators, such as, for example, in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Everywhere there is necessarily a videoconferencing device for telepresence at meetings (it is more difficult to work via Skype). The Internet is a full-fledged tunnel through a corporate network: all services are the same as in Moscow. Encryption, protection, routing, general telephony, local addressing between different cities. Full social package, business trips to Moscow up to 2 times a year on average (for primary education, for the New year and for the summer corporate party in honor of the company's birthday), medical insurance, food, gym, English training. No "sellers" - only engineers, testers and developers. Another couple of analysts and architects, but usually the analyst needs to travel a lot, so analysts sit in Moscow.

In St. Petersburg, a class B + office is located on the Petrograd side. This center is the oldest since Moscow, it has been developing since 2009. Executives grew out of developers right there. There are a lot of local customers in St. Petersburg - there are large projects for NPPs, Lenta and others. Food in Trattoria is on prepaid cards. The team has about 30 people.




Office in Petersburg

In Nizhny Novgorod office for 15 people. There are a lot of large companies in the region that form the labor market - the same Intel and MERA, so there are a lot of good developers. Eat in the dining room. An office in the center, not far from the Oka embankment, in the area of ​​the former Molitovsk flax spinning mill.


Office in Nizhny Novgorod

In Irkutsk, everything happened differently: a ready-made team came to us at once, more than 20 people. And even in the old team under the new wing began to return those who "flew" to another job on financial terms. About this center will be more later.

In Perm there is a good flow of candidates, universities work well, there are large IT companies. The center has just opened, there while 2 people per 50 square meters, the team is just beginning to form. For now, they simply compensate for food (which, in the opinion of Perm developers, is already much better than in any other IT company in Perm), but a cafe-restaurant has already opened on the first floor of the business center - now we are working on the issue of cooperation. By the way, we filter out the premises in business centers not least of all by the toilets (I already have a whole collection of photographs of the latrines of the BC) - here everything is the most accurate in the country, plus a kilometer away from the office in the former Soviet factory Morion. a whole cluster of IT companies.


Timlide Place in Perm

Krasnodar , if someone does not know, this is the largest region of the Russian Federation after Moscow and St. Petersburg in terms of population. All the developers from the Crimea, who can no longer work for foreigners at home, arrived there. There whole teams are released. The center has just been opened in the business center at the intersection of the Red Partisans and Turgenev, the food in the building.


Krasnodar office in the business center "Senate"




Office in Krasnodar

In Samara, the center was opened last year, while the team there is small - only three people. There are places for new employees (Samara developers, we are waiting for you!). Office in a modern business center with a very cool dining room.


Dining in Samara

The office in Troitsk (formerly Academic Town, now Naukograd) was founded by the old residents of Krok, who at some point felt sorry for wasting time traveling to the head office, and working at home was not very convenient. The office itself is located in a small office building on the border between the city and the forest:



Now it employs five people on a regular basis (and another one comes out in August), plus guys who live in the south-western districts of Moscow often come, and in the summer, it happens that colleagues who are happy owners of cottages nearby settle. Troitsk is a very compact city, surrounded by still existing forests. The path from the house to the office, as a rule, is carried out on foot along the forest paths. And in the winter, if you wish, you can even go skiing to the office. Team - technical managers and leading developers (java, .net, c ++). I must say that we are developing the direction of robotics, and that's just part of this area lives in Troitsk. Therefore, the office may seem a little more hardcore compared to the usual developer offices. There is a large amount of strange iron in it.

At the same time, many regions, for example, Kazan, Novosibirsk and Yekaterinburg, have fallen out of geography so far (in theory, there is a lot of IT work and specialists, but you cannot embrace the immense). So far we have stopped at the fact that if suddenly some team decides to come to us, they are ready to assimilate according to the Irkutsk scenario.

What and what we develop

80% of the order comes from the public sector. Of course, in the industry there is some problem with approvals, there is some kind of “non-strict Agile”, and often there is no clear result from a strange tender. But in general, everything is settled by the Moscow office, and a fairly accurate TZ falls on the developers.

In Perm, for example, we have been doing electronic document management for 10 years, the whole administration lives on it. We often work for the oil industry from the same Krasnodar and Chelyabinsk - from those we can call - Sibur, plus a couple of large companies. We make a census of the Lower, they are very interesting . Irkutsk does automation of work of the Moscow courts of general jurisdiction, Samara helps. There was also a schedule of electric trains CPPK .

Almost always the work goes either in MS Visual Studio or in IDEA from Jetbrains. For example, in the workflow system, Oracle databases are used, then EMC Documentum, then on top of CSEC (our framework for EDMS, which is developed from St. Petersburg).

Here is the story of one of the representatives from the developers, Tatiana:

The concept of the CSEC platform has been worn out over the years. They began to implement quite spontaneously, in conditions of limited time and human resources and with great plans to use the system in the upcoming project. Therefore, we decided to refine and improve our existing developments, which we currently do not regret. To use the Spring Framework did not come immediately, but after 1.5 years. By this time, the developers have already penetrated the needs and requirements of the system, they realized that writing their IoC is not appropriate. The catalyst for embedding Spring was also the need to urgently launch parallel development of 8 subprojects. They were developed by more than 20 developers, and all had one common core of the system being developed, while the subprojects introduced their own features for the implementation of common functions. The platform also has its own engine for implementing workflows. Being in a state of overwhelming joy from working on the platform, the developers did not notice how they wrote their solution to implement workflow. And now we can offer customers workflow of any complexity in a short time.
Not so long ago, we with one of the customers understood how cool it would be for ordinary users (for example, accounting employees) to go into Excel and change the workflow routes in the company (which way and to whom to deliver the document for editing or coordination) using several cell edits. This feature was implemented by integrating the system with ODM.
We also tried to make our system GUI always look fashionable and modern. EMC Documentum at the time offered an old-school interface on JSP with page overload on every click of a user. Therefore, we have created a framework for developing GUI systems at CSEC using ExtJS. Also, the CSEC platform is able to recognize printed text, generate and read barcodes using ABBYY RS and ASPOSE ". Another feature of our solution is the ability to separate the processes of collecting, processing and generating reports in time. That is, users see the report (say, by performing discipline) after 3-5 seconds.
In general, it is unrealistic to create a platform for the development of highly loaded systems (yes, I do not exaggerate, our solutions at CSEC received EMC awards as the largest in Europe). You feel pride and mad drive :) On the other hand, the responsibility and the scale of the systems do not allow to rest sometimes not only during the working day, but also at night. Since our solutions are used in different time zones (for example, in Shanghai and Vienna), and even there are emergency reporting periods, and NG is celebrated less there. But I do not regret the strength and years devoted to these projects. They helped me grow both professionally and personally, greatly expanded the number of my professional connections.

Testers often work with equipment: all sorts of bulletin scanners, medical kits, ipads for business leaders.

Specs for the workplace iron are approximately as follows: monitor 2 pieces x 23 ", OptiPlex 7040 Mini Tower PC (i7-6700, 2 x 8 GB, 256GB Solid Drive, 2nd 1TB 2.5 inch SATA (7200 Rp, or Latitude E5550 laptop i7-5600U 15.6 "FHD, 16GB, 256GB SSD, HD5500, Ubuntu 14.04, 3Y NBD.

Sometimes there is a remote job, because the binding to the result, not the process.

Irkutsk example more

The office on the first floor of the building is historic, where the team that came to KROK worked until the merger. This is just a purchased room in a residential building, where once there seemed to be a supermarket. The only office today outside the business center. Previously, the team worked for a large oil company outside, there were all - analysts, testers, implementers. After joining CROC, members of the team joined a much greater variety of projects: they began to do a census, courts, and much more. Inside the office are two rooms with developers and testers. There is also a separate meeting room and kitchen.

Ours there actively tighten features to this original office on their own initiative. For example, Vitaly made a smart toilet. Prior to this, the main problem was with the employment of the toilet (there are now two), it was difficult to get into. As a result, he soldered the sensor on Arduin: the occupancy of the room is removed from the infrared sensor, plus there is an attachment - to see whether it is busy or not and how many people have already spent time there.

Development environment on local machines, not in the tunnel. Internet is fast.


Standard Developer Workplace in the Irkutsk Development Center

In the Irkutsk development center employs about 25 people. Several colleagues shared the specifics of their work.

So, Paul (below in the photo) is working on a census:

From July 1 to August 15, an agricultural census takes place throughout Russia. Task - support AS VSHP-2016. Specialists of the office are engaged in technical support of the Far East and Siberia, as the geographical position allows you to perform your work in comfortable working hours.

Denis is testing subsystems for this project:

I am looking for inconsistencies in the documentation and implementation of the subsystems, checking that the control works correctly. For example, so that the copyist could not answer that he has hard winter wheat more than winter wheat in general. Or that the system was able to declare the presence of several hectares of industrial hemp, or a camel somewhere in the Chelyabinsk region.

Now, by the way, scribes will no longer be walking with a pile of paper questionnaires, but with such a mobile device. All data will automatically fall into the head system with the advent of the Internet.


Pavel :

With my Moscow colleagues, I am engaged in the support and modernization of the PC "Judicial and arbitration proceedings". As can be seen from the name of the complex, it represents a unified system for recording and controlling the movement of files and documents. As part of the project, I am refining both the application itself and the judicial statistics.

Sergey :

Most of the employees of the Irkutsk office are engaged in an electronic document management project for a manufacturing company. In our office, analysts, developers, testers, implementers work on the project. Now the system is in the phase of mass replication, 30 organizations are connected from Khabarovsk to Moscow. By the end of the year, several more branches will be connected. About 30 thousand users actively use the system every day. The project is implemented on our own development - the Corporate Electronic Document Management System (which is based on EMC Documentum). Of the most interesting improvements, the distributed system architecture is worth noting - in each branch a separate installation is deployed, information exchange between organizations is implemented on the basis of the JMS specification. Message brokers are also distributed across branches and united into a single network, which allows increasing the reliability of message delivery. Another interesting subproject is a mobile client for the workflow system. This is primarily a solution for top managers, easy to use and allowing the manager to be aware of the production situation, no matter where he is - in the workplace or at a retreat. Now the mobile client is implemented for the WinRT and WPF platforms, and plans to transfer to other mobile platforms.

Ilya :

The project on which I work is the Centralized data processing system for one large state agency. This system is designed to ensure the processing and storage of regular statistical observations, including primary, at the federal level on the basis of a single NSI; ensuring uniform data processing mechanisms in various statistical observations; ensuring the separation of data access rights and detailed logging of user actions; ensuring central planning and monitoring of statistical observations; increase the speed of response to changes in the methodology due to a single software deployment point.

The customer operates with a huge amount of data. I will not dare to name the exact amount, but I think these are dozens or even hundreds of terabytes of data per year. One solution for how to live with it was to use the Cassandra database. Working with such a NoSQL database includes certain restrictions in the form of the absence of join-s, the inability to sample by any fields you want, Cassandra has many restrictions on how to write conditions. It is also necessary to put up with the duplication of data, and if a new requirement suddenly appears, then you need to be prepared that you may have to create another table.

Anatoly:

I am working on a module for publishing video records of court sessions - this is necessary for viewing by remote participants in a personal account that will appear at the end of this year on the external portal of the Moscow City Court. It is likely that some high-profile cases will be broadcast online, for example, for the media. If e-justice continues to evolve, then, I think, in about five years, it will be possible to have a super show like: “In the corner of the beginning, I’m in favor of Vitka Kosoy, a serial killer and an alcoholic, as well as a malicious computer pirate and a deputy’s son! Innoire corner of Zaal - Innokentiy Dmitrievich, merciless prosecutor of the year! Look on the channel of the Moscow courts of general jurisdiction. Just kidding, of course ... But, working on the project, I realize how much the format of work of this seemingly bureaucratic industry is changing. This coup. It is very nice to be involved in this.

Links

• Here you can read in detail about the project in the Moscow City Court and 35 district courts
• Project based on CSEC CROC for SIBUR
• A post about how we develop heavy application software
• And a little more about CROC’s own developments in an interview