Dmitry Sorin, Senior Software Engineer at Atlassian, shared his impressions of five years of work at Yandex

Dmitry Sorin, currently working in the Atlassian office in Sydney and having moved to Yandex at five years later, shared his own impressions and experience gained during this time in a publication on Medium . This material is reprinted without change with the permission of the author.

About Yandex and not only

In early 2012, I moved from St. Petersburg to Moscow to start working at Moscow Yandex. Over the next five years, I worked as a developer of extensions for Firefox and not only (I participated in the development of Yandex.Bar, Elements and Visual Bookmarks for Firefox and Chrome), led the development of the frontend of the TV Program (tv.yandex.ru), the new KinoPoisk (what is now located on the plus.kinopoisk.ru domain) and many internal Cinema and TV projects, trained manual testers to write autotests. In January 2017, I quit Yandex and moved to Sydney to start working at Atlassian as Senior Software Engineer.

This post is the quintessence of my experience in Yandex for five years. I was lucky to work with great specialists who taught me a lot. I was also lucky to work not only as a developer, but also to gain leadership experience - the so-called. “People management”, when exactly the team, not the code, becomes the main focus. Something may be missing here, but this is what you want to save, so that you can then go back and check yourself.

Is it difficult to get into Yandex?

To get difficult, but possible. Personally, I passed about 6 interviews, and I filled up the first two. There is a single rule: try, fill up the interviews, tighten the weak points and try again. During the five years of work in Yandex, I interviewed many candidates, but there were very few of those who worked on the bugs and came again. A positive attitude is very important: you don’t need to worry that you don’t know something: even those who interview you probably don’t know everything. It is important the desire to solve the task, the ability to learn, a positive attitude and perseverance.
For me personally, the positive and constructive attitude of the candidates was the most important point in the interviews. Of course, this does not negate the point that you need to prepare for interviews.
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The company has many specialists of a higher level than you

This is hard to believe, especially at the start, because you are such a great specialist. The important point here: it does not mean that you are useless. This means that there is someone to learn from and with 99% probability this guy who tells you about the “blue green deployment” knows what he is talking about. With the right positive and constructive approach, this will help you a lot: there is much to grow and from whom to learn.

Yandex salaries

There is such a common story about the fact that in Yandex salaries are slightly lower than in the market. If to simplify, then probably we can say that the attitude to this in the company is the following: yes, the salaries are slightly lower, but we have excellent internal services, excellent people and professionals, compensation for food and an excellent social package. This compensates for the decline in wages, but in Russia as a whole, developers in Yandex pay very well. If I had gone to Mail.Ru / Jetbrains, my salary would not have become much more.

In general, the salaries in big Yandex (the search portal) are now changed by review every six months or a year and it seems that this is more good than bad. But those who stayed at the company know better about it.

Six months before the dismissal, I received my first RSUs (I received, and did not wait for the Westing, that is, I did not finish the Wester of the first quarter for six months). Yes, they are, and developers with a certain grade can receive them based on the results of the review and not only. Get RSU is quite possible. For this you need to match two things: to be a cool and valuable employee + to have an adequate leader who is interested in his team. If you do not have an RSU, but it seems to you that it could be, you can always talk to your supervisor - it certainly will not be worse.

Work-life balance - definitely not about Yandex

This is a purely personal IMHO, but if you think that you can properly combine work and personal life while working in Yandex, move up the career ladder and simultaneously increase salary, then I strongly doubt it. Here everything is built for maximum performance, projects are burning here, they love to fuck for slaughter, they can write code at night and on weekends at home.

On the other hand, I have quite a few examples of Yandex.xoids who live in Moscow, raise children and go to the office exactly as if to work. So it depends a lot on your attitude to work and the product your team will work on.

There are many different projects in the company.

When it bothers to work in one project, there is always the opportunity to move to another with the help of rotation and this is not something bad. Anything happens: the product is fed up; the leader is a cruel tyrant; the technological stack does not suit him. In this regard, everything is quite good in the company: our HR real cats: they usually find a place in which you will like it. So in due time I got to media services, where I found a completely new team.

When you come to work at Yandex, interrogate your future potential colleagues in the final interview in as much detail as possible: what are the plans for the product, how is the planning and interaction between the teams, what development vector does your future team adhere to? It would be nice to talk personally with the future leader. Yandex is big - the development in one part of the company can be quite lively and modern, and completely crushed and not needed by anyone in the other.

How to get a promotion

It was completely incomprehensible to me at the start, and only now, having worked as a manager, can I say something specific about this. You need to figure out the plan, do not argue with the head of small things (in general it is worth believing your leader) and a bit of luck.

• Figure according to plan. You are expected to close tasks at a high pace with high quality. Also, your work must be predictable, so that management can plan some tasks and deadlines for their implementation. If you decide to start doing tasks not from the project plan, then in essence you are destroying product / project plans.
• Disputes with the manager usually do not lead to anything productive. Usually the manager has more experience than you, so some decisions may be obvious to him, but you do not. Sometimes you can trust people, and after completing tasks in a more relaxed atmosphere (say, coffee coffee), you can discuss other solutions to problems.
• Luck. As I have already written, you can get a tyrant leader, a leader who is not interested in the growth of employees, or just a leader without much experience. Here you can not guess.

However, this is just my opinion. It is based on what I needed as a leader . You may be caught by a manager who likes developers who are ready to argue about each decision. It may just be unlucky and you will work in a department that does not develop and everything stands still. In any case, it is worth communicating with the management and learning firsthand what is required.

Housing loan

I do not know how things are with the purchase of apartments in other cities, but in Moscow this is very difficult. Apartments are expensive, mortgages are not very accessible, some buy apartments in the Moscow region and go to work by train.

In this regard, such a thing as a residential housing loan (an interest-free loan for 3 years from which you only pay tax) is a great help when buying an apartment. The size of it depends on your salary, so do not rush to take it. In 2015, I took 2kkv in a mortgage near the Moscow Ring Road with the help of a Yandex loan, for which I am very grateful to the company. When dismissing the balance of the loan must be paid at a time.

Different people work in the company and not all of them are perfect.

For a long time I was sure that everyone in the company was fluffy cats and professionals. Alas, all things have a wrong side. The vast majority of Yandex employees are professionals and it is a pleasure to work with them. But surprisingly, there are incompetent and strange people who came to the company by mistake or patronage. There are also slaughtered people, offended by the whole world (the focus of this is the forchan’s branch of Yandex), and simply by people who are dribbling by shit. However, this is rather an exception, they are really rare.

For the most part in Yandex you will work with pleasant people and great professionals in your field, but it is worth remembering that people are different.

Girls in Yandex ...

... the most intelligent and beautiful. It's true.

As a result, I would like to emphasize this: Yandex is an amazing company, perhaps the best for working in IT in Russia.

After an unsuccessful restart of KinoPoisk, I had almost no tasks left in media services that would be interesting to me, and the new management was busy stabilizing the service, although it is true that not everyone knows this.

That is why in 2016 I began to interview various foreign companies, and at the end of the year I chose Atlassian, after which in 2017 I moved here. The main factors for me were the ability to write code and practice English.