Interview with Yakov Shuvaev about a team of engineers, motivation and interviews
One of the features of the work of a large integrator is that everyone knows or roughly represents what this integrator is doing and for which customers. The latter is usually brought to the attention of the masses or low-key press releases, or the integrator logo in the list of partners of the customer. But very often, many do not realize exactly how such work is carried out, and forget that behind a large company logo there are living people.
We will try to change the situation a little - we bring to your attention an interview with the head of one of the technical departments of LANIT, Yakov Shuvaev . The department specializes in implementing solutions in the field of building a reliable and secure software infrastructure of information systems, services providing the production development cycle, as well as on everything related to databases and information security.
Jacob, tell us a little about yourself and briefly about your department. What are you doing and what are you working on now?
I will begin, probably, with study. I'm from RUDN. He studied at the Physics and Mathematics Department on the specialty “Applied Mathematics and Computer Science”. The first three courses of study took all the time, in the fourth there was a bit of freedom, and I decided it was time to get to work. It was 2006. There were three options. The main plan was to go to those companies that were real reviews from my friends. There were two such options, and the first on the list was LANIT. My classmate who studied on a parallel stream for some time already worked there. He organized for me my first ever interview in an IT company. At this interview, I was greeted by my immediate future manager, development team leader and vice-president of the company, who was not vice-president at the time, but was a simple project manager - they were sitting in the same box in openspace. At that time, I had little idea what roles were in IT companies, so I went to the same position as my classmate, Developer Trainee. By the way, if then I wanted to do what I’m doing now, it wouldn’t work out for me - at that time there were a couple of database specialists in the unit structure, and there weren’t any administrators and security engineers. After the development team leader found out that I don’t know much about GWT, JEE and the garbage collector, and my programming experience comes down to writing labs in high school and playing C # sudoku for PDAs, he passed me on to my future manager. I was given an A4 sheet with logic tasks. As it turned out, everyone interviewed in the development department went through these tasks.
')
What other options were there? You said you had three.
If I chose the second option, now I would probably work in one of the companies acquired by Rostelecom. I think it's also a good option.
The third option, a spare one, was to post a resume on the website with vacancies, wait for feedback and throw letters at potential employers. Fortunately, the second and third options are not useful.
On one of the first projects I was assigned to deploy the system with one of the customers. I liked to assemble a working system from a set of parts. When I had to assemble a cluster of application servers, then BEA Weblogic, a “new wondrous world” opened up.
I found out that in order for the system to work quickly, reliably and safely, one code is not enough. Plus, as practice has shown, if the code works for the developer, this does not mean that it can be just picked up and run in a cluster.
Further more. There were new projects on which I already completely switched from development to administration. So in the projects of the division in which I worked, Linux, SVN and the server of continuous build appeared in its current form. The only thing - I was embarrassed that for a long time I could not find on the Internet a suitable description of my IT role in the project and the team. It was a little wider than system administration, the term DevOps appeared only in 2008, and I did not stumble upon the abbreviation SRE. In the end, I puzzled over what I actually do. It strained.
With these thoughts, I wrote to my manager, after which he suggested calling this activity “IT infrastructure”, and accordingly my role on projects as an “IT infrastructure specialist”. Life gained meaning and rushed ...
Yes, and as I already understand, at that time I was engaged in infrastructure better than writing code.
In 2009, a project was launched to develop one of the state portals. The production process began to change dramatically in accordance with the flow and scale of new tasks: the team grew, the number of test benches grew. Stands needed to be created, maintained up to date, it was necessary to prepare for the launch of the system into commercial operation. I began to miss one thing for all the activities, and we began to expand the staff of the “infrastructure workers”. As I have already said, at that time there were Oracle database specialists on the staff who were not entirely clear to which administrative unit to include: either to the development, or to the administration. In the end, they decided that I would be in charge of them.
At the time of the formation of the sector, it employed 5 people, including me.
By 2016, our division has opened additional regional offices in Chelyabinsk, Perm, Saratov and Izhevsk. “The little dog has grown a bit”, and in 2016 our team became distributed - more than 30 people. The question arose about its transformation into a larger administrative unit of the unit - the department.
During the preparation for this, it was necessary to solve a very "difficult" question - how to call the department. On the one hand, the team has long been known for such keywords as “infrastructure” and “databases”. On the other hand, the field of our activity has significantly expanded since 2010, and the word “infrastructure” has been associated by many with iron, network, data centers - with everything that another LANIT department professionally did and does.
At the interviews that I do, telling what our department is doing, I usually draw a picture in the form of a pyramid, which conditionally represents the levels of an abstract information system, starting with the hardware on which everything works, and ending with the application software that our division develops. Top level "Applied software" - the level of the development department. It implements the application functionality that is needed by the customer of the information system.
Below are the levels our department deals with. Some levels of the pyramid, we close completely, some - in part. By partial closure, I understand that the department’s employees should at least understand what is happening there and there in order to solve the main task - to make the software work quickly, reliably and safely.
These tasks can be solved by building an “infrastructure perimeter” around the application code, but it is obvious that this is most often impossible to do, so we work closely with the development team and the team that deals with hardware, network and virtualization to achieve these goals.
It should be understood that there is no “fence” with the level of software in the upper part of the pyramid and the level of physics from below. At a minimum, to answer the question of whether to optimize the code, add hardware, or “screw up” the OS, you must either understand all these levels, or be able to correctly diagnose and formulate the question to who understands.
The structure of the department is divided into sectors. The first sector provides services for the operation of information systems. This is usually the third level of support, which means that the team is aware of what the system is, how it works, what tasks it performs and is directly involved in the system development process. The objectives of this team are to ensure reliable, fast and safe operation of the software in an industrial environment and to ensure the continuity of production processes. The main tasks that the sector team solves include: creating and configuring deployment automation solutions, infrastructure and business monitoring, configuration management, cloud management, reliability assurance, and everything associated with it. By 2017, in contrast to the time when it all began, progressive humanity managed to come up with terms that can be as accurate as possible to describe what the sector is doing now - a mixture of the elements of DevOps and SRE.
What else did the department do?
The second direction is services. The Jira and Wiki systems have long been an integral part of the production process of almost any unit project. In addition, on the basis of Jira, in addition to the design, many services of the unit itself are automated, ranging from ordering the office and getting VPN access for remote work and ending with the process of hiring new employees.
The third direction of the sector’s work is the provision of cloud computing resources and data storage resources for the project’s project teams. We provide services for the organization of the rental of resources from different cloud providers, such as Amazon, Selectel, OnCloud, and automating the preparation of test environments for projects in the clouds.
The second sector is a team of database specialists. At the beginning of their journey, the team specialized only on Oracle DBMS. Over time, the guys got a lot of experience with PostgreSQL DBMS, RIAK DB and a number of products that are somehow connected to databases. For example, the same Delphix.
With the expansion of team competencies, the class of tasks solved by the team was transformed.
New class of tasks required the use of new tools?
A source
It's not always the same. Sometimes the task comes, and it must be urgently solved. It does not matter what tools. If it turns out that at this moment you can only hold a microscope in your hands, then all tasks, including “nailing”, will be solved by a microscope. By the way, this is normal if the customer wants a microscope, pays for the microscope and for the house built with the help of a microscope and in the end gets what he wants. From the outside, the situation may look strange, but if the customer is satisfied, the goal is achieved.
For obvious reasons, we try to avoid such situations. To solve problems, make projects and not look strange at the same time, it is important to be aware of what is happening around you in the industry before receiving a new task or starting a new project. Knowledge of a wide range of technologies and solutions makes it possible to explain to the customer that a microscope is not the best thing in the world, and to offer the most optimal option for solving the problem.
And how do you do it?
We try to keep up to date :) Watch webinars, go to conferences, organize meetings. If deadlines allow, we try to use new technologies on some tasks so that when the time comes, we can offer them too.
Clear. Infrastructure and databases - is this all you do or are there any other directions?
There is. In 2015, we started to deal with areas of information security and the design of disaster-resistant solutions. Among the results we can mention the completion of the design of a redundancy scheme for two large state information systems. In one project, the system is reserved for two data centers, in the second - for four.
As far as I know, the same Amazon allows you to do this almost out of the box. What is the difficulty?
Amazon provides this opportunity at the level of its infrastructure or services - depending on what you use. At the same time, depending on the technologies that are used on your project, it will work well only if you take into account the possibility of “moving” between data centers at the level of your system code. Otherwise, the result will be unpredictable. In our case, the task was to come up with a redundancy scheme for many years already working system that would guarantee the specified performance of RTO and RPO.
OK. What about security?
In any country, there are laws and regulations that require a certain class of systems to meet a certain set of requirements. In Russia, the basic laws in this area are 149, 152 and 63 FZ and the corresponding orders of various departments. Since we mainly deal with government information systems in which personal data can be processed, and digital signatures can also be used, we must take into account the requirements of this entire standard. From the results I can note the completion of work on certification of one of the information systems that our division is developing, according to the requirements of FSTEC, we have certified the software included in this system, and two impact assessments according to the requirements of the FSB.
In addition to legally binding events, inside the unit, we train colleagues from other departments to test and develop information security issues in the production and operation of systems.
And how does the name of the department sound?
"Department of infrastructure solutions, services and data management." Long, but reflects the essence of what we do.
What are you especially proud of while working?
I am proud that I managed to put together a professional team with which to solve problems and which I trust.
How do you motivate employees to achieve the desired results? And what is the secret of a successful team, in your opinion?
Specially motivate no one. In my work I proceed from two principles. The first is when setting the task, besides describing what I expect as a result, I try to outline the context: why and who needs the result of this task. I know from my own experience that there is no stranger state when you try to guess what exactly they want from you and in what form, especially if the task you receive at the entrance is not from who needs the result.
Secondly, I assume that all of us are adults, including trainees. To everyone who comes to us, I say that if the task is incomprehensible, do not try to guess and think out, you need to come up and ask - no one will hit the forehead, but this can save everyone a lot of time.
About the secret of success. It is better to ask this question to my head, the division director :) If he had hypothetically answered that our department was successful, I would, hypothetically, answer this question with history. Unfortunately, I do not know who the author is, but she is very close to me in spirit. It sounds like this:
Do you think there is a shortage of personnel in LANIT and in the IT field as a whole? What specialists LANIT needs today to solve the tasks set for the company? And what needs to be done to keep young people working in the company?
Good questions. There are difficulties with hiring specialists, but this situation is typical for the entire market - not only for LANIT. Since the projects our division is working on usually do not involve work “from here to lunch”, the list of specialists that are suitable for us is greatly narrowed.
In my opinion, there are several options for how to be in such a situation.
The first one is classic. You can search for the people you need, using classic HR approaches, for a long time, but the output is always of high quality. Many can argue with me here, but I can tell you about my experience. I guess I was lucky with our HRs.
You can also search for people in the regions, you can take interns and pump them under the tasks you need. All three methods will not make the current team well right now, but in the future they will solve the problem.
The second is to promote a company on the market, in social networks and to attract those who had never even thought about working at LANIT before. Everybody knows about Yandex, Avito, Mail.ru, and what do you know about LANIT? Always ask this question at the interview.
And what is the answer?
Usually, if they come from integrators, they most likely heard something, but not necessarily about the projects that our division was engaged in. LANIT is a group of companies, and each of them specializes in something. Someone builds spaceports, someone is engaged in ATMs - there are different directions. The rest of us either do not know anything, or they can answer something like “Yes, I heard ... This is what you are doing public services?” :) And this is despite the fact that LANIT has been one of the three largest IT companies in Russia for years, and with projects, who implemented only our unit, used throughout the country.
The main thing is not to dwell on one approach and, fortunately, in this respect we are actively moving in the right direction. We hold mitapy, came to Habr. Plus, the trainee program is now gaining momentum, according to which we are looking for young guys to come to us for training and further employment.
We try to be in trend.
In the trend - it's good. How to keep employees?
To begin with, I would like to say that no one is holding anyone by force :) In order for the employees not to leave, conditions must be created that it would be difficult to part with. First of all, it is an opportunity to do your favorite business, then - so that employees feel stability and growth prospects in the company, third - so that they can develop for the benefit of themselves and the company.
In order to achieve this, firstly, it seems to me important that each employee understands what the unit in which he works is living and living. If he does not understand this, he will not understand what he is doing and why, and of which he is a part.
Obviously, we are not a startup or a product division, although we also have our own software and internal startups. First of all, we are an integrator who makes projects. Large and complex turnkey projects. What does this mean in practice? This means that we implement the full production cycle of creating information systems, starting with the collection of requirements and ending with the operation and development of the systems already functioning in production. The projects we work on are socially significant and important for the country. One awareness of what you do and how many people use the result of your work, motivates very much.
Secondly, each employee must understand what opportunities the work in the company opens for him, what options he has for development and opportunities for it.
The division has accumulated tremendous experience that can be learned and developed with its help at a breakneck pace. I am sure that there are not so many companies and divisions that can share the knowledge and competencies that our experts possess. Take it and learn!
The theory is clear, but what about practice? Does it all work right?
Well ... we are not perfect, but we try to go in this direction. Most of this theory can immediately "feel" in practice. The dynamics of our projects is such that, once in the production cycle of the next release of some federal “spacecraft” at the end of the year, you can gain more experience in a month than in another company in a year.
A source
At the beginning, this speed is confusing. Sometimes it's hard to understand what's going on. But plunging into this atmosphere, it is already difficult to abandon this rhythm, which motivates you to keep abreast of progress and constantly evolve.
And, of course, thirdly - interviews.
To keep an employee, you need to make sure that he does not need to be held. And for this it is necessary that the team got people who are 100% fit into the team and immediately join the general flow. To understand whether this employee will fall into the stream or not, in a few hours of an interview, this is still a task. Starting communication with candidates, I always synchronize the terminology with them first and foremost. Everyone who comes to us usually worked somewhere before. Everyone has their own understanding of certain terms: someone says that he is an architect, someone tells about what they did high-load projects, someone says that they have a lot of data stored in databases, etc. . Before building a dialogue, you need to understand that you speak the same language. If you watched the movie "Arrival", then here is about the same story.
In the case of our division, one project may consist of dozens of parts, each part being a separate large project for other companies. Each such project is made by a separate team consisting of a manager, analyst, development team, etc. When at the first meeting a person says that he "participated in 100 projects, supported 1000 servers and deployed more than 9000 databases," then at first glance it seems that a person with such experience should be taken to the team without looking. But, if you begin to dive into the details, often it becomes not so obvious.
Another important thing that I always ask the people I interview is, what would they like to do in an IT company if they had a choice, all other things being equal? What is the soul, if you want? Since we constantly have vacancies for different roles, we, as a rule, do not filter people for vacancies, but we look at people and, if there is such an opportunity, we give them a choice - what position they should take. For me, the main thing is that the person we take will not only do the work well, but also get pleasure from it - then the probability that he leaves will be less.
Fourth, in order for people to be able to pump, grow, share experiences and express themselves, you need to maintain a constant process of accumulating this experience and transferring knowledge. We also have such opportunities.
A corporate knowledge base in the Wiki format may not be surprising anyone now, but it’s still worth talking about it. Our database contains many pages created by employees, with examples of solving technical problems and articles on various IT topics. These are not articles of Habr's format or something like that. These are more likely notes from employees of varying degrees of detail for their own colleagues, who quickly help newcomers to orient themselves in the set of technologies that we use, and quickly dive into the project or recall something that was already long ago.
For those employees who are closely in the corporate Wiki, and why hide for PR too, we launched the # TechGuruDay series of events last year, with Twitter and a channel in Telegram. Mitapes are held on the LANIT site with live reports on IT topics. Our employees can speak in the company of invited external speakers. Launched this year a blog on Habré, in which all employees can write. By the way, taking this opportunity, I invite everyone who has an interesting topic for the mitap, contact me on the website meetup.com - if the theme somehow intersects with what we are doing, we will organize a joint mitap.
Therefore, in summary, I can say that it seems to me that there are more reasons than not to leave us than to leave! But, life situations are different, and they leave us too. In these cases, we are usually very sad, but continue to work further. Especially, knowing that the departed employees are sad with us and very often come back after a while.
Do you have plans to launch any new activities?
This year, I want to spend more TechGuruDay meetings than I did last year, I want to say something interesting at some conference.
What can you wish your colleagues?
Do not stand in one place, constantly evolve and move the world forward!
If right now people want to get to your team, where will they find out about your “spacecraft” and who you need?
It will now be like the last slide at any presentation from the conference with a big “WE'RE HIRING” inscription.
About the "spaceships" you can ask questions in the comments. In short, we are looking for specialists in PostgreSQL and Oracle databases, engineers with ansible and python knowledge into the DevOps / SRE team, architects and security engineers. Moreover, all levels. Well, and, like everyone, we have a website with vacancies , where everything is detailed in more detail.
We will try to change the situation a little - we bring to your attention an interview with the head of one of the technical departments of LANIT, Yakov Shuvaev . The department specializes in implementing solutions in the field of building a reliable and secure software infrastructure of information systems, services providing the production development cycle, as well as on everything related to databases and information security.
Jacob, tell us a little about yourself and briefly about your department. What are you doing and what are you working on now?
I will begin, probably, with study. I'm from RUDN. He studied at the Physics and Mathematics Department on the specialty “Applied Mathematics and Computer Science”. The first three courses of study took all the time, in the fourth there was a bit of freedom, and I decided it was time to get to work. It was 2006. There were three options. The main plan was to go to those companies that were real reviews from my friends. There were two such options, and the first on the list was LANIT. My classmate who studied on a parallel stream for some time already worked there. He organized for me my first ever interview in an IT company. At this interview, I was greeted by my immediate future manager, development team leader and vice-president of the company, who was not vice-president at the time, but was a simple project manager - they were sitting in the same box in openspace. At that time, I had little idea what roles were in IT companies, so I went to the same position as my classmate, Developer Trainee. By the way, if then I wanted to do what I’m doing now, it wouldn’t work out for me - at that time there were a couple of database specialists in the unit structure, and there weren’t any administrators and security engineers. After the development team leader found out that I don’t know much about GWT, JEE and the garbage collector, and my programming experience comes down to writing labs in high school and playing C # sudoku for PDAs, he passed me on to my future manager. I was given an A4 sheet with logic tasks. As it turned out, everyone interviewed in the development department went through these tasks.
')
Interesting fact. Not everyone knows, but the Physics Institute of the People's Friendship University of Russia is tightly settled in LANIT. Only in one subdivision, in which Yakov works, 5 more graduates of the Physics Department of RUDN work.
What other options were there? You said you had three.
If I chose the second option, now I would probably work in one of the companies acquired by Rostelecom. I think it's also a good option.
The third option, a spare one, was to post a resume on the website with vacancies, wait for feedback and throw letters at potential employers. Fortunately, the second and third options are not useful.
Then
On one of the first projects I was assigned to deploy the system with one of the customers. I liked to assemble a working system from a set of parts. When I had to assemble a cluster of application servers, then BEA Weblogic, a “new wondrous world” opened up.
I found out that in order for the system to work quickly, reliably and safely, one code is not enough. Plus, as practice has shown, if the code works for the developer, this does not mean that it can be just picked up and run in a cluster.
Further more. There were new projects on which I already completely switched from development to administration. So in the projects of the division in which I worked, Linux, SVN and the server of continuous build appeared in its current form. The only thing - I was embarrassed that for a long time I could not find on the Internet a suitable description of my IT role in the project and the team. It was a little wider than system administration, the term DevOps appeared only in 2008, and I did not stumble upon the abbreviation SRE. In the end, I puzzled over what I actually do. It strained.
With these thoughts, I wrote to my manager, after which he suggested calling this activity “IT infrastructure”, and accordingly my role on projects as an “IT infrastructure specialist”. Life gained meaning and rushed ...
Yes, and as I already understand, at that time I was engaged in infrastructure better than writing code.
DevOps and SRE
In 2009, a project was launched to develop one of the state portals. The production process began to change dramatically in accordance with the flow and scale of new tasks: the team grew, the number of test benches grew. Stands needed to be created, maintained up to date, it was necessary to prepare for the launch of the system into commercial operation. I began to miss one thing for all the activities, and we began to expand the staff of the “infrastructure workers”. As I have already said, at that time there were Oracle database specialists on the staff who were not entirely clear to which administrative unit to include: either to the development, or to the administration. In the end, they decided that I would be in charge of them.
At the time of the formation of the sector, it employed 5 people, including me.
By 2016, our division has opened additional regional offices in Chelyabinsk, Perm, Saratov and Izhevsk. “The little dog has grown a bit”, and in 2016 our team became distributed - more than 30 people. The question arose about its transformation into a larger administrative unit of the unit - the department.
During the preparation for this, it was necessary to solve a very "difficult" question - how to call the department. On the one hand, the team has long been known for such keywords as “infrastructure” and “databases”. On the other hand, the field of our activity has significantly expanded since 2010, and the word “infrastructure” has been associated by many with iron, network, data centers - with everything that another LANIT department professionally did and does.
At the interviews that I do, telling what our department is doing, I usually draw a picture in the form of a pyramid, which conditionally represents the levels of an abstract information system, starting with the hardware on which everything works, and ending with the application software that our division develops. Top level "Applied software" - the level of the development department. It implements the application functionality that is needed by the customer of the information system.
Below are the levels our department deals with. Some levels of the pyramid, we close completely, some - in part. By partial closure, I understand that the department’s employees should at least understand what is happening there and there in order to solve the main task - to make the software work quickly, reliably and safely.
These tasks can be solved by building an “infrastructure perimeter” around the application code, but it is obvious that this is most often impossible to do, so we work closely with the development team and the team that deals with hardware, network and virtualization to achieve these goals.
It should be understood that there is no “fence” with the level of software in the upper part of the pyramid and the level of physics from below. At a minimum, to answer the question of whether to optimize the code, add hardware, or “screw up” the OS, you must either understand all these levels, or be able to correctly diagnose and formulate the question to who understands.
The structure of the department is divided into sectors. The first sector provides services for the operation of information systems. This is usually the third level of support, which means that the team is aware of what the system is, how it works, what tasks it performs and is directly involved in the system development process. The objectives of this team are to ensure reliable, fast and safe operation of the software in an industrial environment and to ensure the continuity of production processes. The main tasks that the sector team solves include: creating and configuring deployment automation solutions, infrastructure and business monitoring, configuration management, cloud management, reliability assurance, and everything associated with it. By 2017, in contrast to the time when it all began, progressive humanity managed to come up with terms that can be as accurate as possible to describe what the sector is doing now - a mixture of the elements of DevOps and SRE.
Bases
What else did the department do?
The second direction is services. The Jira and Wiki systems have long been an integral part of the production process of almost any unit project. In addition, on the basis of Jira, in addition to the design, many services of the unit itself are automated, ranging from ordering the office and getting VPN access for remote work and ending with the process of hiring new employees.
The third direction of the sector’s work is the provision of cloud computing resources and data storage resources for the project’s project teams. We provide services for the organization of the rental of resources from different cloud providers, such as Amazon, Selectel, OnCloud, and automating the preparation of test environments for projects in the clouds.
The second sector is a team of database specialists. At the beginning of their journey, the team specialized only on Oracle DBMS. Over time, the guys got a lot of experience with PostgreSQL DBMS, RIAK DB and a number of products that are somehow connected to databases. For example, the same Delphix.
With the expansion of team competencies, the class of tasks solved by the team was transformed.
New class of tasks required the use of new tools?
A source
It's not always the same. Sometimes the task comes, and it must be urgently solved. It does not matter what tools. If it turns out that at this moment you can only hold a microscope in your hands, then all tasks, including “nailing”, will be solved by a microscope. By the way, this is normal if the customer wants a microscope, pays for the microscope and for the house built with the help of a microscope and in the end gets what he wants. From the outside, the situation may look strange, but if the customer is satisfied, the goal is achieved.
For obvious reasons, we try to avoid such situations. To solve problems, make projects and not look strange at the same time, it is important to be aware of what is happening around you in the industry before receiving a new task or starting a new project. Knowledge of a wide range of technologies and solutions makes it possible to explain to the customer that a microscope is not the best thing in the world, and to offer the most optimal option for solving the problem.
And how do you do it?
We try to keep up to date :) Watch webinars, go to conferences, organize meetings. If deadlines allow, we try to use new technologies on some tasks so that when the time comes, we can offer them too.
Safety and reliability
Clear. Infrastructure and databases - is this all you do or are there any other directions?
There is. In 2015, we started to deal with areas of information security and the design of disaster-resistant solutions. Among the results we can mention the completion of the design of a redundancy scheme for two large state information systems. In one project, the system is reserved for two data centers, in the second - for four.
As far as I know, the same Amazon allows you to do this almost out of the box. What is the difficulty?
Amazon provides this opportunity at the level of its infrastructure or services - depending on what you use. At the same time, depending on the technologies that are used on your project, it will work well only if you take into account the possibility of “moving” between data centers at the level of your system code. Otherwise, the result will be unpredictable. In our case, the task was to come up with a redundancy scheme for many years already working system that would guarantee the specified performance of RTO and RPO.
OK. What about security?
In any country, there are laws and regulations that require a certain class of systems to meet a certain set of requirements. In Russia, the basic laws in this area are 149, 152 and 63 FZ and the corresponding orders of various departments. Since we mainly deal with government information systems in which personal data can be processed, and digital signatures can also be used, we must take into account the requirements of this entire standard. From the results I can note the completion of work on certification of one of the information systems that our division is developing, according to the requirements of FSTEC, we have certified the software included in this system, and two impact assessments according to the requirements of the FSB.
In addition to legally binding events, inside the unit, we train colleagues from other departments to test and develop information security issues in the production and operation of systems.
And how does the name of the department sound?
"Department of infrastructure solutions, services and data management." Long, but reflects the essence of what we do.
What are you especially proud of while working?
I am proud that I managed to put together a professional team with which to solve problems and which I trust.
About motivation
How do you motivate employees to achieve the desired results? And what is the secret of a successful team, in your opinion?
Specially motivate no one. In my work I proceed from two principles. The first is when setting the task, besides describing what I expect as a result, I try to outline the context: why and who needs the result of this task. I know from my own experience that there is no stranger state when you try to guess what exactly they want from you and in what form, especially if the task you receive at the entrance is not from who needs the result.
Secondly, I assume that all of us are adults, including trainees. To everyone who comes to us, I say that if the task is incomprehensible, do not try to guess and think out, you need to come up and ask - no one will hit the forehead, but this can save everyone a lot of time.
About the secret of success. It is better to ask this question to my head, the division director :) If he had hypothetically answered that our department was successful, I would, hypothetically, answer this question with history. Unfortunately, I do not know who the author is, but she is very close to me in spirit. It sounds like this:
“One manager is being interviewed.
- Tell me, do you have all the employees constantly attend different conferences, get certificates, go to different trainings and meetings to the offices of other companies ... Are you not afraid that they will learn everything at your expense and leave you?
“I am afraid that they will learn nothing and will remain.”
Employee recruitment
Do you think there is a shortage of personnel in LANIT and in the IT field as a whole? What specialists LANIT needs today to solve the tasks set for the company? And what needs to be done to keep young people working in the company?
Good questions. There are difficulties with hiring specialists, but this situation is typical for the entire market - not only for LANIT. Since the projects our division is working on usually do not involve work “from here to lunch”, the list of specialists that are suitable for us is greatly narrowed.
In my opinion, there are several options for how to be in such a situation.
The first one is classic. You can search for the people you need, using classic HR approaches, for a long time, but the output is always of high quality. Many can argue with me here, but I can tell you about my experience. I guess I was lucky with our HRs.
You can also search for people in the regions, you can take interns and pump them under the tasks you need. All three methods will not make the current team well right now, but in the future they will solve the problem.
The second is to promote a company on the market, in social networks and to attract those who had never even thought about working at LANIT before. Everybody knows about Yandex, Avito, Mail.ru, and what do you know about LANIT? Always ask this question at the interview.
And what is the answer?
Usually, if they come from integrators, they most likely heard something, but not necessarily about the projects that our division was engaged in. LANIT is a group of companies, and each of them specializes in something. Someone builds spaceports, someone is engaged in ATMs - there are different directions. The rest of us either do not know anything, or they can answer something like “Yes, I heard ... This is what you are doing public services?” :) And this is despite the fact that LANIT has been one of the three largest IT companies in Russia for years, and with projects, who implemented only our unit, used throughout the country.
The main thing is not to dwell on one approach and, fortunately, in this respect we are actively moving in the right direction. We hold mitapy, came to Habr. Plus, the trainee program is now gaining momentum, according to which we are looking for young guys to come to us for training and further employment.
We try to be in trend.
About employee retention
In the trend - it's good. How to keep employees?
To begin with, I would like to say that no one is holding anyone by force :) In order for the employees not to leave, conditions must be created that it would be difficult to part with. First of all, it is an opportunity to do your favorite business, then - so that employees feel stability and growth prospects in the company, third - so that they can develop for the benefit of themselves and the company.
In order to achieve this, firstly, it seems to me important that each employee understands what the unit in which he works is living and living. If he does not understand this, he will not understand what he is doing and why, and of which he is a part.
Obviously, we are not a startup or a product division, although we also have our own software and internal startups. First of all, we are an integrator who makes projects. Large and complex turnkey projects. What does this mean in practice? This means that we implement the full production cycle of creating information systems, starting with the collection of requirements and ending with the operation and development of the systems already functioning in production. The projects we work on are socially significant and important for the country. One awareness of what you do and how many people use the result of your work, motivates very much.
Secondly, each employee must understand what opportunities the work in the company opens for him, what options he has for development and opportunities for it.
The division has accumulated tremendous experience that can be learned and developed with its help at a breakneck pace. I am sure that there are not so many companies and divisions that can share the knowledge and competencies that our experts possess. Take it and learn!
The theory is clear, but what about practice? Does it all work right?
Well ... we are not perfect, but we try to go in this direction. Most of this theory can immediately "feel" in practice. The dynamics of our projects is such that, once in the production cycle of the next release of some federal “spacecraft” at the end of the year, you can gain more experience in a month than in another company in a year.
A source
At the beginning, this speed is confusing. Sometimes it's hard to understand what's going on. But plunging into this atmosphere, it is already difficult to abandon this rhythm, which motivates you to keep abreast of progress and constantly evolve.
And, of course, thirdly - interviews.
About interviews
To keep an employee, you need to make sure that he does not need to be held. And for this it is necessary that the team got people who are 100% fit into the team and immediately join the general flow. To understand whether this employee will fall into the stream or not, in a few hours of an interview, this is still a task. Starting communication with candidates, I always synchronize the terminology with them first and foremost. Everyone who comes to us usually worked somewhere before. Everyone has their own understanding of certain terms: someone says that he is an architect, someone tells about what they did high-load projects, someone says that they have a lot of data stored in databases, etc. . Before building a dialogue, you need to understand that you speak the same language. If you watched the movie "Arrival", then here is about the same story.
In the case of our division, one project may consist of dozens of parts, each part being a separate large project for other companies. Each such project is made by a separate team consisting of a manager, analyst, development team, etc. When at the first meeting a person says that he "participated in 100 projects, supported 1000 servers and deployed more than 9000 databases," then at first glance it seems that a person with such experience should be taken to the team without looking. But, if you begin to dive into the details, often it becomes not so obvious.
Another important thing that I always ask the people I interview is, what would they like to do in an IT company if they had a choice, all other things being equal? What is the soul, if you want? Since we constantly have vacancies for different roles, we, as a rule, do not filter people for vacancies, but we look at people and, if there is such an opportunity, we give them a choice - what position they should take. For me, the main thing is that the person we take will not only do the work well, but also get pleasure from it - then the probability that he leaves will be less.
About Mentoring
Fourth, in order for people to be able to pump, grow, share experiences and express themselves, you need to maintain a constant process of accumulating this experience and transferring knowledge. We also have such opportunities.
A corporate knowledge base in the Wiki format may not be surprising anyone now, but it’s still worth talking about it. Our database contains many pages created by employees, with examples of solving technical problems and articles on various IT topics. These are not articles of Habr's format or something like that. These are more likely notes from employees of varying degrees of detail for their own colleagues, who quickly help newcomers to orient themselves in the set of technologies that we use, and quickly dive into the project or recall something that was already long ago.
About mitapah
For those employees who are closely in the corporate Wiki, and why hide for PR too, we launched the # TechGuruDay series of events last year, with Twitter and a channel in Telegram. Mitapes are held on the LANIT site with live reports on IT topics. Our employees can speak in the company of invited external speakers. Launched this year a blog on Habré, in which all employees can write. By the way, taking this opportunity, I invite everyone who has an interesting topic for the mitap, contact me on the website meetup.com - if the theme somehow intersects with what we are doing, we will organize a joint mitap.
Therefore, in summary, I can say that it seems to me that there are more reasons than not to leave us than to leave! But, life situations are different, and they leave us too. In these cases, we are usually very sad, but continue to work further. Especially, knowing that the departed employees are sad with us and very often come back after a while.
About future plans
Do you have plans to launch any new activities?
This year, I want to spend more TechGuruDay meetings than I did last year, I want to say something interesting at some conference.
What can you wish your colleagues?
Do not stand in one place, constantly evolve and move the world forward!
If right now people want to get to your team, where will they find out about your “spacecraft” and who you need?
It will now be like the last slide at any presentation from the conference with a big “WE'RE HIRING” inscription.
About the "spaceships" you can ask questions in the comments. In short, we are looking for specialists in PostgreSQL and Oracle databases, engineers with ansible and python knowledge into the DevOps / SRE team, architects and security engineers. Moreover, all levels. Well, and, like everyone, we have a website with vacancies , where everything is detailed in more detail.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/330510/
All Articles