Where to work in IT, release 1: Voximplant

The job description and the first day inside the company are similar to both expectations and reality - everything is approximately like this, but there are lots of surprises. About the company, where are you settling in, you want to know much more than your intended function in it. How is life inside, what are the policies, rules and processes, what are the goals of people?

Now "My Circle" will talk about it regularly. We will talk with large and small companies about their inner life so that you can look there.
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In the first release, Voximplant , a cloud platform for developers of communication services and applications.

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About 10 years ago, Aleksey Aylarov and his company made the Zingaya service, which allowed companies to call directly from the site, without using a telephone and installing additional software.

At about the same time, a whole market of cloud communication platforms as services (CPaaS) began to take shape in the world. At first it was SMS via the cloud, then calls, messages, video. Now the market has grown strongly. For example, only one Twillio platform, which a few years ago went public in the US, earns hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

In 2014, together with Andrey Kovalenko and Sergey Poroshin, Alexey launched the Voximplant service. This is also a cloud platform for calls, on the basis of which you can build any applications and services. We talked with Alexei (A.A.) and Vasily Kudryavtsev (V.K.), Voximplant HR-specialist, about how the work in the company is arranged, life in the office and what kind of developers they are now looking for.


Vasily Kudryavtsev and Alexey Aylarov

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Product and technology

- How did this name appear - Voximplant? Sounds cyberpunk.

A.A .: And so it happened. Implants are used to empower people in science fiction films: insert something for yourself and become more advanced. And we approached this way - “vox” (voice) as an implant can be embedded in various applications and services. And in the future, who knows, maybe something will be built into people. Now it is not very common, but little by little any body modding will come in this direction.

- And what problem do you solve with your product?

AA: The point is that before businesses, start-ups or just developers needed to develop everything from scratch themselves. I want to make my Skype - you need to find engineers, specialists and make it work.

Now you can take such a platform, take the usual web developers or developers of mobile applications, and they can use the platform and its tools to make a conditional Skype or call center, or PBX, or something else.

The task is to transfer low-level complex development, where there are few specialists, to a higher level, faster and simpler one, where there are many specialists. In our particular case, we chose JavaScript as the main engine for writing call processing scripts in the platform, and there are millions of JavaScript programmers around the world.

- What are the parts of the product itself? What technologies?

AA: The main part is the infrastructure itself, which consists of all kinds of media servers, backends, APIs, and so on. They allow you to create entities in the platform: applications, users, and others. Then, it is possible to create scripts for calls to JavaScript, which can be run in several ways.

The first way is when a call is simply made to the platform via HTTP and it starts the call. A JavaScript session is launched in the cloud, and inside this session there can be a call, speech recognition, recording - all the functionality that we have. Depends on what the specific customer needs.

Similarly, a session in the cloud may occur if the call comes from a phone number connected to the platform. You can buy or rent phone numbers directly from us. You can connect your numbers or your infrastructure via SIP: in order to build an application on us, and receive traffic through SIP and send it back.

A session with calls may also occur if one of our SDKs (a library that can be integrated) is ringing through our platform. There is a web-based SDK for the browser that uses WebRTC technology for working with sound, video and data. There are SDK for Android, for iOS, React Native SDK. There is even an SDK for Unity, if you want to build communications in any AR or VR application.

At the same time, in the cloud every time there is a session in which JavaScript tells you what to do with this call: put it in a queue, record it, recognize it. You can make complex scripts. That is, we have one of the first CPaaS platforms that immediately used the “serverless” approach. This means that you can minimize the data exchange between our backend and the backend, which contains client data.


Dinosaurs Pavla

- I look at the list of sought-after skills in your company - there is also JavaScript, about which you spoke, but there is also C ++, Java, PHP. So what kind of specialists do you need?

AA: Depending on which part of the platform is used, different people are needed. The mobile SDK needs people who work with Android and iOS. Objective-C, Java or Swift, plus knowledge of C ++, so that you can build a library on the RTC and so on.

We have C ++, we have Java, we have JavaScript, PHP, NodeJS. The number of languages ​​is probably so big because of the complexity of the platform. It is easier to say what we do not use, than to list what we use.

- This is due to the fact that your task is to integrate and implant in any system?

A.A .: Not only. We simply choose the technology and language that is most suitable for doing something concrete from the backend point of view. And if we talk about the SDK and the library, then yes, this is already a question of the limitations imposed by the platform. For example, iOS wants the SDK to work with Objective-C, then for development we need a person who can do it.

Evaluate Voximplant on My Circle - We recently launched a valuation service for companies as employers on My Circle. Your ranked third among companies numbering up to 100 people. Our companies are evaluated by 12 criteria, and what do you consider your strengths as an employer? AA: We are trying to make people interested in what they are doing. We find people who care, they do not write code for the sake of code. We have a large part of people interested in the result, and this, I think, is one of the main criteria for the success of any company. We try to maximize working conditions as much as possible. Our office is expanding, we are improving it in every way. Naturally, we do not compete with companies such as Yandex or Google, because this is a slightly different level of approach to this process. If we grow up to 1,000 people - then, probably, we will also be that way. And now we are just trying to make everyone feel comfortable working. - You have the highest scores just in the nominations “Interesting tasks”, “Modern technologies” and in the nomination “The company makes the world better”. AA: Yes, I just said that. As for such things as career or professional growth, again, if the company is large, such as Google and Yandex, there are longer verticals, and it is clear that there you can jump from position to position long enough if you come from below. If the company is not very big, then your professional and career growth will be associated with the development of the company itself, including its level. This is what we are trying to develop through internal programs, English training, conferences, and so on.

The structure of the company

- How many people work in your company?

AA: Now we have about 65-70 people. Basically, everything between 25-35 years. At the same time, we do not divide employees into office and remote. Basically, everyone works full time in the office. There are cases when someone can remotely work, but these are rather rare cases.

- You, I understand, do not work on the remote. And the experience of working with foreign experts on the remote is also missing, respectively?

AA: The only thing we have ever done on the remote is the design for large concepts - for example, to completely update the site. But gradually, in the process of work, many things began to appear that need to be done constantly. You can’t give them to big guys, like AIC Media - they are not comfortable doing small things. Or we now have new internal products such as Smartcalls, a service of robotic calls. There is a lot of work associated with the UX, and you need people inside who will do it.

Of course, we take some things from partners, like Google - for example, Cloud or speech recognition. But those parts of the product that we consider important and critical (and now we, in principle, consider everything important and critical) - we try to do inside.

- Is this your principled position?

AA: Honestly, we do not have good management of remote employees, and it was not a very good experience a couple of times. But I'm talking about the technical part.

Naturally, developing geographically, you have to think about remotes. But this is still not development, but technical support, Customer Service, sales, marketing. If we sell in the USA, then we have people who do it on the spot.

Maybe at some point we will have new offices for development in new markets. Sometimes it is pointless to close only on Russia. But the development we do not want to make somewhere. There are enough specialists, enough money to keep and feed them in Moscow too.


Developer Room

- Tell us about the departments and teams.

AA: Formally, a company is divided into two major parts: development and sales with marketing.

In development, everything is structured just as the platform is structured. There are backend developers who directly make the platform. There are mobile SDK developers. Under each part is allocated its own unit. And there are infrastructure issues, engineering.

If we talk about the rest - we have management, marketing, sales, accounting, there is support. In general, everything is more or less horizontal. Designers are now separate, before there was.

- How are units organized?

AA: These are groups from 2 to 10 people. We have colleagues who develop the server side, use C ++ and so on - complex high-performance pieces with telephony. They report directly to the technical director Andrei Kovalenko. There are now about three people in this group. In this particular unit, all seniors, we do not have the possibility of holding juniors here.

And if we talk about front-end development, with regard to websites, UI / UX, grocery items, then there are both juniors and middle ones. There is a high-level team manager - team leader. Whether one individual management is needed or not depends on how many people there are and what function they perform.

- I wonder what your sex ratio is? Most likely, more, of course, men?

V. .: Percent 30 on 70! In the development of four female programmers we have.

- What about your collective meetings? I now read that some companies shorten them extremely, in order not to waste time. Some, on the contrary, follow the path of expanding these meetings.

AA: We have some kind of hybrid - not to say that we tend to do a lot of meetings, but we can’t do without them at all either.

There are meetings dedicated to specific problems and their solution. There are - about "to tell who does what and why it is needed." Recently, we began to introduce small rare meetings on mentoring, so that someone could tell someone how to use, how to become better. There are strategic meetings in which the whole company listens to what we are doing, why, why, what plans we have for the year, quarter and so on. I spend them myself about once every six months.

As for sales, they have their own system of meetings.

- What kind of collaboration tools do you use?

. .: We had a conversation around the Telegram, Slack somehow did not get accustomed.
Virtually every administrative unit has its own group in the Telegram. And so - like everyone else: Email, Jira, CRM, phone. Task trackers all sorts, someone Trello uses when you need something simpler.

- Do you as the CEO and founder participate in the daily development or sales activities?

AA: I’m more involved in observation. I communicate with techies who develop products, and with the business that sells the product. I need to understand what is claimed, what is not claimed, what can be done, and what is not, what can be done long and expensive, and so on. That is, I no longer write huge chunks of code, naturally.


Alexey Ailarov

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Training and putting newcomers to work

- Do you often have new employees?

AA: Over the past 2 years we have been actively expanding. In a year, probably, almost twice as many people became.

- How do you introduce them to work?

. .: At first, all this was not very organized, but now, when there are more people, and people like Vasily appear who are involved in HR-processes, everything is already being rebuilt.

We have special systems. For example, the training system for sellers is one, and the system for connecting a developer to tasks is slightly different. Everything is repelled by the tasks and KPI, which puts leadership. Then it all breaks down into subtasks, and people are just told what, why and why. It usually takes some time, within a month or two, in order to enter well into what we do. This is not the easiest thing in the world! Well, after people are already quietly working.

V. .: Now we are just introducing a training system for beginners. So far it looks like a series of some lectures and stories on different products and in different directions: the technical side of Voximplant, the business side of Voximplant.

We plan to formalize all this in the form of presentations and videos so that people who will come later have a knowledge base for entering the company.

AA: From additional training, we have English - teachers come and work with groups a couple of times a week. Our task is for all employees to improve their English level: for example, to communicate with a client, if necessary. Plus written English for those who write documentation and so on.

- Do you attend any external events - conferences, seminars?

AA: Yes, usually these are individual wishes. There are events in which we act as a company to tell about ourselves. There are events where we send people, and where they just share their experiences and listen to others, get acquainted.

Usually, the developers themselves choose where they want and say: “May I go there somewhere?”. And they answer: "Well, okay, go, why not!"

- Is the company sponsoring or the developer himself lays out his money?

AA: Depends on what kind of event. The company sponsors participation of the developer in the event, if he is traveling in the interests of the business. If the interest is personal, employees, as a rule, understand this and pay for everything on their own. That is, depends on the circumstances and what you need to get to this event.

About education and universities - Yesterday, we just talked with Grigory Petrov, your evangelist, and he defended the opinion that our technical universities, in fact, do not prepare high-quality developers. Did you finish Bauman? How far are our universities lagging behind in order to prepare a really good developer who will be in demand now? AA: I think that this is not even a function of the university. Development - it is developing so rapidly that no university just has time for it. Therefore, the main task of the university is to give a fundamental education. Relatively speaking, if there they learn to program in C ++, then later you can study additional materials yourself, go to conferences, work in companies - develop your skills and learn further programming. The university has another task. On the other hand, no one bothers them to do this with additional courses, which some, in my opinion, are doing now. In principle, if sufficiently good programmers emerge from MIPT, Baumanki, ITMO, Moscow State University, MSTU, it can be concluded that a combination of factors related to fundamental education, plus self-development, at some point allow people to become normal programmers.

Motivation and career growth

- Tell us how the motivation of employees is built?

AA: We have different KPIs that we follow. This is easy to check in sales and more difficult to develop.

We have a roadmap and there is an understanding of where it goes well, where it goes wrong. If everything is good - naturally, there is a bonus. If everything is bad, then there is no depremiation, but the manager conducts a conversation with an employee. Therefore, everyone knows what they want from them.

And if we talk about motivation, which seems to us important - we are making a serious and high-quality product known on a global scale. People want to be involved. Their motivation is to contribute to the development of the company's brand.

There are all sorts of corporate parties, team buildings - well, it's like everyone else. People are able to relax: get together when the company offers to do it, and go on their own somewhere, communicate.


Sales room

- In “Heroes of Might and Magic” on Fridays, chop it all together?

AA: It’s already difficult for us to do this so that we could interest everyone at the same time. Each group finds common interests and communicates on their basis.

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