How IT professionals work. Fedor Bykov, Director of Research and Development at PROMT

We continue to ask specialists about the mode of work and rest, professional habits, the tools they use, and much more. It will be interesting to find out what unites them, in what they contradict each other. Perhaps their answers will help to identify some general patterns, useful tips that will help many of us.

Today our guest is Fedor Bykov from the company PROMT.

Fedor graduated from the Leningrad Mechanical Institute (now BSTU "Voenmech"). In the company PROMT works since 1997. Since 2017, he has led all areas of development at the company. In her free time she enjoys traveling, playing sports and learning foreign languages.
')
What do you do in the company?

I plan, give assignments, check, consult, argue, praise, swear, test, “get on the head”, “give on the head”, design, report, discuss, invent, test, look for mistakes, write specifications, correspond, and still do a lot of things different and interesting. In general, I lead the development of the PROMT automatic translation system.

One word that best describes how you work?

Multithreaded

How many hours a day do you spend on work?

9 - 10 hours - full time, 6-7 hours - partially, in parallel with other matters.

How many hours do you sleep?

6-7 hours.

How do you have breakfast?

Tasty (smiles).

What are you doing on the way to / from work?

I talk on various topics, including work.

What kind of todo-manager do you use personally?

OneNote.

What applications and services can't you do without?

I can not do without water and food, the lack of the rest can be overcome. But if we talk about services and applications that greatly help in life, the search engine - Google, workflow and planning - MS Office and SharePoint, maps, navigation, traffic jams in Russia - Yandex, abroad - Google, finance - Sberbank, messenger - WhatsApp , translator and dictionary - Translate.Ru, mail - Outlook, Gmail.

What kind of task manager / issue tracker / repository do you use in the company?

Basically - services based on MS SharePoint, Team Foundation Server is used as a version control system.

What other tools and software do you use at work?

Visual Studio, the company's internal services, the whole range of software being developed.

Does the company have internal projects?

Yes, there are internal projects. For example, one of them is called PROMT in PROMT. Actually, this is an internal working translation service, which each department uses for its own needs.

For example, for legal and financial services, the marketing department and HR is a full-fledged service for translating internal documentation with all the latest innovations of our technology, and for development it is a working service where numerous tests and tests are conducted, as well as a way to get feedback from users inside the company .

What annoys you most when you work?

The need to answer stupid questions and take part in empty correspondence.

What professional literature would you recommend?

I can not highlight something special, because it is too much.

What do you prefer: electronic reading rooms or paper books?

At work, almost everything I read in electronic form, but for myself personally I prefer paper books.

What technique and why do you prefer at work and at home?

There are two phones - Microsoft Lumia 550 as the main one (no matter what they say, but I really like what MS did, both in terms of hardware characteristics and OS capabilities) and some other for working purposes (testing developed software, studying competitors' applications, understanding opportunities and so on).

Now I am using an iPhone 6+, a small laptop on Windows 10, a tablet and a full-fledged desktop computer in the workplace.

What do you listen when you work?

Yourself and your colleagues.

What kind of professional advice for the future can you give yourself?

To be more restrained and tolerant towards colleagues, to put oneself more in the place of others in order to understand them better.

What would you recommend to a person trying to go the same way?

Do not try to do it, go your own way.