Interview with Leonid Vasilyev, Dropbox developer, about work and life in Ireland
Site Reliability Engineer at Dropbox Leonid Vasilyev has been living and working in Ireland for four years. Leonid told how he moved to Ireland, why he moved from Amazon to Dropbox, how their office in Dublin works, and how he sees the future of DevOps.
Before moving, Leonid studied at the Ural State University's mat-meche and worked in Yandex for five years.
- Since 2013 you live in Dublin. How did you make this important decision? You deliberately chose a country and a company where you want to work, or did you get an offer that you cannot refuse?
The decision at that moment did not seem important, rather logical. It so happened that I received an offer from Amazon in Dublin and decided to go. Amazon attracted me by the fact that the infrastructure of this company is huge, it was interesting to work with AWS services, as well as in an international company.
')
- What is the difference between the life and work of a developer in Russia and Ireland?
The main difference that surprised me is that it is not customary to recycle in Ireland. Everyone follows the balance between personal life and work. Holidays in Ireland are 25 days, and the weekend is not taken into account, therefore, if you take two full weeks of vacation, only 10 days will be counted. Work here mainly on American companies. I almost did not see small web studios, IT solutions integrators and small Internet providers here.
- Does this mean that Irish companies are able to more effectively organize the work process?
I don’t think it’s just a very cautious approach to everything related to the staff. Companies need employees to feel happy.
- Have you encountered something unexpected / unusual in terms of organizing work, life, mentality? How long did you get used to local life? Is it possible to find buckwheat with sour cream in Dublin or is it necessary to change food habits?
I got used to the fact that drinking tap water is normal :)
As a rule, the team is very international, it is often the case that the team is all people from different countries. English is not enough for anyone native language. When I came to Dublin for a face-to-face interview, it was the first time that I spoke to someone in English live on professional topics.
Dublin is a small and quite cozy city, so I got used to it pretty quickly. There are a lot of people from Eastern Europe in Ireland - Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, etc. In Dublin, there is a network of Polish shops, where there are many varieties of buckwheat and excellent sour cream "Daisy". Also there you can buy herring and pickles.
- How do you spend your free time in Ireland?
In their free time, people usually go to the cinema, to pubs, to concerts, they often go to nature. Ireland is a rather small island. It takes about 2.5 hours by car to cross it horizontally. A lot of people play sports. Almost all companies sponsor sports, ranging from discounts to the gym, to paying a fee for the marathon. Water sports such as surfing are popular here. Irishmen often go to rugby and Gaelic football matches.
More from Ireland is very accessible to travel to Europe: local low-cost airline RyanAir (which is based in Dublin Airport) for 10 euros can fly to London, and for 50 - to Portugal.
- Are there any corporate parties, as they pass? Are they different from the usual in Russia?
Companies have the so-called Happy Hour. This is usually a few hours on Friday evening, when a mini-bar with drinks is served in the dining room.
There are usually two large corporate parties in a year: in December before Christmas and in the summer (Summer Party). For Christmas, usually some large premises are taken (for example, a museum or restaurant), and in summer everything takes place in a park or on a rugby field. Dropbox also arranges corporate events at the Halloween and St. Petersburg office. Patrick's Day.
- Is it possible for a Russian developer to get a job in an Irish company? Can you give any advice?
Irish IT-companies are quite few, mostly there are branches of companies from America. Interview format is standard among all companies. It is relatively easy to come to Ireland to work, there are no quotas for work visas (as, for example, for H1B in the USA), you do not need to take an English exam (like IELTS when you receive a work visa to the UK). Most often, people with experience are brought here who can work independently in the company and do not require constant attention from the manager. If in 2012 only large and well-known companies transported employees, now almost everyone does it.
- Tell me more about it. What documents and pitfalls need to be collected? How do employers help with relocation? If it's not a secret, what relocation package did Amazon offer you?
Rules for moving change quite often. I was issued a work visa in 2012, so much could change.
The whole process is supervised by the employer, all that was required of me was to send documents (passport, confirmation of past work in a specialty, transfer of a diploma) and sign a contract for work.
The documents were sent via DHL, a couple of months went to the consideration of my application, and then in response came a document from the Irish Ministry of Labor (directly work permit). With this document, I received an entry visa at the Irish embassy. In Ireland, I signed up for the immigration service and received a reusable visa for traveling from Ireland.
Amazon paid one-way tickets for me and my wife, a corporate apartment for 3 weeks, visas and issued a cash bonus. Often, companies offer a service for the transport of personal belongings in a container (through contractors).
- IT specialist to get an offer and move seems simple. And what about their wives and children? How to carry a family with them so that they are not locked in 4 walls?
IT specialists are most often issued a work permit, which is called Critical Skills Permit - according to it you can move immediately with the whole family. The right to work is received only by the one who received the offer, the rest of the family can simply live in Ireland, study or engage in unpaid volunteering.
At the same time it is not necessary to be officially married. Ireland also recognizes partnerships (here it is called the Defacto Relationship), which need to be confirmed by two years of living together before moving to Ireland. Your partner will not automatically receive a work permit: you will need to find a company that will issue a work permit, but the requirements for such a permit are much simpler than for the permit of the main visa holder.
- Why did you switch from Amazon to Dropbox?
In Amazon, it was interesting to work the first two years, after which the tasks became quite monotonous. I wanted to go from a company with thousands of developers to a company with hundreds. Initially, I became interested in Dropbox after I went to the EuroPycon 2012 conference, where I learned that Guido van Rossum (the creator of Python) had moved there from Google. When I decided to move from Amazon to a smaller company, I was contacted by a former colleague from Yandex and offered to join the position of Site Reliability Engineer.
- What are you doing at Dropbox?
I am engaged in low-level infrastructure, automation and tools for our data centers and AWS cloud. Also code deployment systems, cluster configurations, etc. Sometimes there are tasks that need to be “dragged” across the entire Dropbox stack, from the OS configuration to the client under MacOS.
- Tell me, how is everything in Dropbox? How is your work organized? Do you go to the office?
Dropbox is quite a young company, just recently emerged from the startup phase, so the atmosphere in the company is rather informal. I work in the Dublin office. It employs about 250 people, developers about 10. The company has a lot of ex-Yandex. There are only 10 people on my team. All but me are in New York. I work in Dublin time, which coincides with UTC most of the year :)
I go to the office for breakfast, by 8-10 am, I do most of the work on projects in the morning. In the afternoon I usually communicate with colleagues from New York and San Francisco, discussing tasks and plans. Once every three weeks I am on-call, this means that in case the Dropbox services are faulty, the “page” comes to me (sms or call).
- What is the best and worst part of your work?
Probably the best is the absence of heavy formal processes and the openness of the company.
I also really like the program that Dropbox spends 2 times a year - Hack Week. During Hack Week, which lasts a week, any developer can work on the project he wants. It can be a personal project or related to work, sometimes people get together in teams and do something together. In the past, Hack Week, I experimented with various BitTorrent clients and the VCDIFF data compression format.
Something very bad is not. Of course, it is difficult to work with remote teams with time zone differences of 5 and 8 hours.
- You have actually been working at the junction of dev and ops since 2008, started before the main hype. What do you think has changed globally in these ten years?
The main changes are, of course, the development of cloud infrastructure, the transition from configuration management systems (CFengine, Puppet, Chef, etc.) to the side of containers (LXC, Docker). Also, SSD and NoSQL have greatly changed the approach to data processing and storage.
- What is primary - infrastructure tools or the right practice? Is there any devops without frameworks for orchestration and such things?
I am convinced that practice + simple automation. The most significant failures, as a rule, occur due to the unreasonable complexity of a process. I am especially careful about open-source solutions developed by one company and, as a rule, have commercial support only from this company.
- There is an opinion that, taking into account the huge practice of large companies, most of the devops-practices and SRE-tools are licked so that new products no longer appear and, apparently, will not appear. Is it so?
Most practices are usually ignored, infrastructure tools are usually in a barely working state. When a service grows, its infrastructure is constantly changing. I have not seen a single service where there would be too many metrics, for example.
- Where should all this movement lead us? Imagine the theme of “SRE weekdays in five years” :)
The number of different services will grow exponentially, the infrastructure will be increasingly localized, to be as close as possible to the user. More and more services will be forced to support clusters in different countries and regions due to the requirement of governments. REST-API will cease to be used. The open web era is coming to an end. The content will be stored in various services encrypted and accessible only to trusted users. The transition to IPv6 and HTTP / 2.0 will accelerate.
- What tools do you use to organize work (including time planning, work space organization, etc.)?
Recently, “Dropbox Paper” for planning, often writing in a notebook on the table any tasks or ideas that come to mind. I communicate in Slack and Google Hangouts. I mainly work in a macbook terminal, using Vim for about 10 years. On a personal laptop I use OpenBSD and WindowMaker. I also use the Kinesis Advantage Keyboard and the Contour RollerMouse.
- Do you read any professional blog? What information resources could you recommend to colleagues for the development of skills?
Regularly only "Hacker News". I follow the programs of several ACM and IEEE conferences. There is a subscription to O'Reilly Safari Books. I try to study some one interesting topic for me than to follow all the trends in the infrastructure.
- Are you able to comply with work & life balance? If so, how, if not, do you need it at all?
With Yandex, it was hard, at Amazon and Dropbox it’s much easier. I usually stay at work for a couple of hours, but no more. In Western companies, they do not treat recycling very well. For example, when I worked at Amazon, I simultaneously studied part-time in a magistracy and I was quite able to combine study and work.
Also a lot of attention is paid to teamwork: planning, design, review of code, documentation and metrics. Therefore, if you work at a weekend on some task alone, then most likely the manager will have questions for you.
- Tell me about training in the Irish magistracy. How is the learning process different? Why chose this program?
I always dreamed of learning from Western universities, Cloud Computing was a fairly obvious choice for me, since I was a world leader in this industry.
The learning process is radically different. Great emphasis is placed on working with various scientific articles (mainly ACM and IEEE). All assignments are written, uploaded online, and all materials are available online. The university has an excellent library. Also, the campus looks more like an office of an IT company: we had a rest room with an xbox and a small server room where we could experiment with different configurations.
- You have worked in three world-renowned companies. What is the most valuable experience (not only professional, but also life) each of them gave you? In such companies, people can work for decades. Why did you choose a different path for yourself?
Units work for decades. Probably the most important thing that was not immediately obvious to me was to try to work with more experienced people who work 5, 10, 15 years more than you. Also, having come to the company, try to start interviewing candidates and be a mentor for interns, this will give a lot of interesting experience that will be useful in your future career.
On April 14, Leonid will speak at the DUMP conference in Yekaterinburg. He tells how, from the point of view of SRE, Dropbox implements the foundation of a stable infrastructure, what technologies are used in Dropbox, and what difficulties it faces.
Thanks to our sponsors who make the conference possible: the General Sponsor - E-Soft , the conference partners - SKB Kontur , Naumen , Sberbank-Technologies .
Photos of Dublin: Masha Vasilyeva
Before moving, Leonid studied at the Ural State University's mat-meche and worked in Yandex for five years.
- Since 2013 you live in Dublin. How did you make this important decision? You deliberately chose a country and a company where you want to work, or did you get an offer that you cannot refuse?
The decision at that moment did not seem important, rather logical. It so happened that I received an offer from Amazon in Dublin and decided to go. Amazon attracted me by the fact that the infrastructure of this company is huge, it was interesting to work with AWS services, as well as in an international company.
')
- What is the difference between the life and work of a developer in Russia and Ireland?
The main difference that surprised me is that it is not customary to recycle in Ireland. Everyone follows the balance between personal life and work. Holidays in Ireland are 25 days, and the weekend is not taken into account, therefore, if you take two full weeks of vacation, only 10 days will be counted. Work here mainly on American companies. I almost did not see small web studios, IT solutions integrators and small Internet providers here.
- Does this mean that Irish companies are able to more effectively organize the work process?
I don’t think it’s just a very cautious approach to everything related to the staff. Companies need employees to feel happy.
- Have you encountered something unexpected / unusual in terms of organizing work, life, mentality? How long did you get used to local life? Is it possible to find buckwheat with sour cream in Dublin or is it necessary to change food habits?
I got used to the fact that drinking tap water is normal :)
As a rule, the team is very international, it is often the case that the team is all people from different countries. English is not enough for anyone native language. When I came to Dublin for a face-to-face interview, it was the first time that I spoke to someone in English live on professional topics.
Dublin is a small and quite cozy city, so I got used to it pretty quickly. There are a lot of people from Eastern Europe in Ireland - Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, etc. In Dublin, there is a network of Polish shops, where there are many varieties of buckwheat and excellent sour cream "Daisy". Also there you can buy herring and pickles.
- How do you spend your free time in Ireland?
In their free time, people usually go to the cinema, to pubs, to concerts, they often go to nature. Ireland is a rather small island. It takes about 2.5 hours by car to cross it horizontally. A lot of people play sports. Almost all companies sponsor sports, ranging from discounts to the gym, to paying a fee for the marathon. Water sports such as surfing are popular here. Irishmen often go to rugby and Gaelic football matches.
More from Ireland is very accessible to travel to Europe: local low-cost airline RyanAir (which is based in Dublin Airport) for 10 euros can fly to London, and for 50 - to Portugal.
- Are there any corporate parties, as they pass? Are they different from the usual in Russia?
Companies have the so-called Happy Hour. This is usually a few hours on Friday evening, when a mini-bar with drinks is served in the dining room.
There are usually two large corporate parties in a year: in December before Christmas and in the summer (Summer Party). For Christmas, usually some large premises are taken (for example, a museum or restaurant), and in summer everything takes place in a park or on a rugby field. Dropbox also arranges corporate events at the Halloween and St. Petersburg office. Patrick's Day.
- Is it possible for a Russian developer to get a job in an Irish company? Can you give any advice?
Irish IT-companies are quite few, mostly there are branches of companies from America. Interview format is standard among all companies. It is relatively easy to come to Ireland to work, there are no quotas for work visas (as, for example, for H1B in the USA), you do not need to take an English exam (like IELTS when you receive a work visa to the UK). Most often, people with experience are brought here who can work independently in the company and do not require constant attention from the manager. If in 2012 only large and well-known companies transported employees, now almost everyone does it.
- Tell me more about it. What documents and pitfalls need to be collected? How do employers help with relocation? If it's not a secret, what relocation package did Amazon offer you?
Rules for moving change quite often. I was issued a work visa in 2012, so much could change.
The whole process is supervised by the employer, all that was required of me was to send documents (passport, confirmation of past work in a specialty, transfer of a diploma) and sign a contract for work.
The documents were sent via DHL, a couple of months went to the consideration of my application, and then in response came a document from the Irish Ministry of Labor (directly work permit). With this document, I received an entry visa at the Irish embassy. In Ireland, I signed up for the immigration service and received a reusable visa for traveling from Ireland.
Amazon paid one-way tickets for me and my wife, a corporate apartment for 3 weeks, visas and issued a cash bonus. Often, companies offer a service for the transport of personal belongings in a container (through contractors).
- IT specialist to get an offer and move seems simple. And what about their wives and children? How to carry a family with them so that they are not locked in 4 walls?
IT specialists are most often issued a work permit, which is called Critical Skills Permit - according to it you can move immediately with the whole family. The right to work is received only by the one who received the offer, the rest of the family can simply live in Ireland, study or engage in unpaid volunteering.
At the same time it is not necessary to be officially married. Ireland also recognizes partnerships (here it is called the Defacto Relationship), which need to be confirmed by two years of living together before moving to Ireland. Your partner will not automatically receive a work permit: you will need to find a company that will issue a work permit, but the requirements for such a permit are much simpler than for the permit of the main visa holder.
- Why did you switch from Amazon to Dropbox?
In Amazon, it was interesting to work the first two years, after which the tasks became quite monotonous. I wanted to go from a company with thousands of developers to a company with hundreds. Initially, I became interested in Dropbox after I went to the EuroPycon 2012 conference, where I learned that Guido van Rossum (the creator of Python) had moved there from Google. When I decided to move from Amazon to a smaller company, I was contacted by a former colleague from Yandex and offered to join the position of Site Reliability Engineer.
- What are you doing at Dropbox?
I am engaged in low-level infrastructure, automation and tools for our data centers and AWS cloud. Also code deployment systems, cluster configurations, etc. Sometimes there are tasks that need to be “dragged” across the entire Dropbox stack, from the OS configuration to the client under MacOS.
- Tell me, how is everything in Dropbox? How is your work organized? Do you go to the office?
Dropbox is quite a young company, just recently emerged from the startup phase, so the atmosphere in the company is rather informal. I work in the Dublin office. It employs about 250 people, developers about 10. The company has a lot of ex-Yandex. There are only 10 people on my team. All but me are in New York. I work in Dublin time, which coincides with UTC most of the year :)
I go to the office for breakfast, by 8-10 am, I do most of the work on projects in the morning. In the afternoon I usually communicate with colleagues from New York and San Francisco, discussing tasks and plans. Once every three weeks I am on-call, this means that in case the Dropbox services are faulty, the “page” comes to me (sms or call).
- What is the best and worst part of your work?
Probably the best is the absence of heavy formal processes and the openness of the company.
I also really like the program that Dropbox spends 2 times a year - Hack Week. During Hack Week, which lasts a week, any developer can work on the project he wants. It can be a personal project or related to work, sometimes people get together in teams and do something together. In the past, Hack Week, I experimented with various BitTorrent clients and the VCDIFF data compression format.
Something very bad is not. Of course, it is difficult to work with remote teams with time zone differences of 5 and 8 hours.
- You have actually been working at the junction of dev and ops since 2008, started before the main hype. What do you think has changed globally in these ten years?
The main changes are, of course, the development of cloud infrastructure, the transition from configuration management systems (CFengine, Puppet, Chef, etc.) to the side of containers (LXC, Docker). Also, SSD and NoSQL have greatly changed the approach to data processing and storage.
- What is primary - infrastructure tools or the right practice? Is there any devops without frameworks for orchestration and such things?
I am convinced that practice + simple automation. The most significant failures, as a rule, occur due to the unreasonable complexity of a process. I am especially careful about open-source solutions developed by one company and, as a rule, have commercial support only from this company.
- There is an opinion that, taking into account the huge practice of large companies, most of the devops-practices and SRE-tools are licked so that new products no longer appear and, apparently, will not appear. Is it so?
Most practices are usually ignored, infrastructure tools are usually in a barely working state. When a service grows, its infrastructure is constantly changing. I have not seen a single service where there would be too many metrics, for example.
- Where should all this movement lead us? Imagine the theme of “SRE weekdays in five years” :)
The number of different services will grow exponentially, the infrastructure will be increasingly localized, to be as close as possible to the user. More and more services will be forced to support clusters in different countries and regions due to the requirement of governments. REST-API will cease to be used. The open web era is coming to an end. The content will be stored in various services encrypted and accessible only to trusted users. The transition to IPv6 and HTTP / 2.0 will accelerate.
- What tools do you use to organize work (including time planning, work space organization, etc.)?
Recently, “Dropbox Paper” for planning, often writing in a notebook on the table any tasks or ideas that come to mind. I communicate in Slack and Google Hangouts. I mainly work in a macbook terminal, using Vim for about 10 years. On a personal laptop I use OpenBSD and WindowMaker. I also use the Kinesis Advantage Keyboard and the Contour RollerMouse.
- Do you read any professional blog? What information resources could you recommend to colleagues for the development of skills?
Regularly only "Hacker News". I follow the programs of several ACM and IEEE conferences. There is a subscription to O'Reilly Safari Books. I try to study some one interesting topic for me than to follow all the trends in the infrastructure.
- Are you able to comply with work & life balance? If so, how, if not, do you need it at all?
With Yandex, it was hard, at Amazon and Dropbox it’s much easier. I usually stay at work for a couple of hours, but no more. In Western companies, they do not treat recycling very well. For example, when I worked at Amazon, I simultaneously studied part-time in a magistracy and I was quite able to combine study and work.
Also a lot of attention is paid to teamwork: planning, design, review of code, documentation and metrics. Therefore, if you work at a weekend on some task alone, then most likely the manager will have questions for you.
- Tell me about training in the Irish magistracy. How is the learning process different? Why chose this program?
I always dreamed of learning from Western universities, Cloud Computing was a fairly obvious choice for me, since I was a world leader in this industry.
The learning process is radically different. Great emphasis is placed on working with various scientific articles (mainly ACM and IEEE). All assignments are written, uploaded online, and all materials are available online. The university has an excellent library. Also, the campus looks more like an office of an IT company: we had a rest room with an xbox and a small server room where we could experiment with different configurations.
- You have worked in three world-renowned companies. What is the most valuable experience (not only professional, but also life) each of them gave you? In such companies, people can work for decades. Why did you choose a different path for yourself?
Units work for decades. Probably the most important thing that was not immediately obvious to me was to try to work with more experienced people who work 5, 10, 15 years more than you. Also, having come to the company, try to start interviewing candidates and be a mentor for interns, this will give a lot of interesting experience that will be useful in your future career.
On April 14, Leonid will speak at the DUMP conference in Yekaterinburg. He tells how, from the point of view of SRE, Dropbox implements the foundation of a stable infrastructure, what technologies are used in Dropbox, and what difficulties it faces.
Thanks to our sponsors who make the conference possible: the General Sponsor - E-Soft , the conference partners - SKB Kontur , Naumen , Sberbank-Technologies .
Photos of Dublin: Masha Vasilyeva
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/324800/
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