Why are employees coming back? Stories left and returned

If you work long enough in one company - for example, eight years (like me, haha) - you will inevitably have a desire to go and see what is on the other side of the usual walls. It happens that you sit in the office kitchen, pour in tea and start thinking about the fact that somewhere, perhaps, the tasks are more interesting, and the cookies are tastier, and growing more career, and in general it’s time to move somewhere to new horizons ... the moment comes a man whom some half a year ago was escorted to the very same new horizons, and he treated everyone to pizza, promised to write and looked at everyone with some degree of superiority. Like, I'm moving somehow. I turn to new work! Now it is waiting for me, oh!

And here - hello, come! Here he is again! But what about the new horizons and wow?
')
You come up to such a person, ask what and how, and he will tell you a funny or sad story about where he was, what he saw there, and why he decided to return. And there were as many as twenty-one people from various departments, from design to marketing, who returned to Veeam's St. Petersburg office. After talking with them, I decided to explain what was heard in the form of an article, to somehow summarize their experience, and at the same time try to figure out why people decide to return.

“Working in our company is a great honor”

Let's start with the story of Kati - an employee of our technical support service. Katya now performs the functions of an operations manager as well as an escalation team leader in support, but there was a moment when she had the chance to completely change her line of business and try herself in a world where huge investments are turning, concrete mixers are hindering, and serious adult uncles go around the office heavy as this concrete looks and the same strong handshakes.

Katya is not one of those who miss the chance, and it’s interesting to see what happens outside the IT industry! Therefore, she took and went into the construction business. However, she practically didn’t have to work directly with serious adult uncles, whom it’s customary to apply exclusively as “Artur Vladlenovich” or “Stepan Sergeevich” - she got a job in a trendy youth department that was created in this company and looked like the depths of a large corporation. But even there, the difference between an IT company and a non-IT was felt very clearly.

Firstly, in that organization, the relationship between management and subordinates turned out to be much more hierarchical and strict. It is in an IT company that you, as a rule, can come into the office of your boss without any problems and talk with him about any question that interests you. But on the way to Artur Vladlenovich, you will first have a “waiting room” with the secretaries, then you have to enter “as it should be”, modestly look down, with your mind not to embarrass the authorities and all that jazz. And none of your hipster “greetings”, “Mish, and here I am thinking ...” and other non-formals in dealing with people who have the word “director” written in the “position” column.

Secondly, there you had to deal with the bureaucratization of everything and everything, when you understand that the issue is solved in ten minutes, but you still have to go through seven circles of hell, collect six approvals, make five phone calls to different people, and maybe weeks after two the desired solution will be received. Separately, it is worth noting the need to call for any reason, because e-mail in such companies is still considered an unreliable means of communication, and only a good old phone (preferably a disk) will never let you down. IT-introverts shocked!

Thirdly, there was a tight schedule, when it is necessary to work strictly by the hour, although there is no reasonable explanation why an employee who is not associated with direct work with clients, should definitely come at 9:00, and the arrival at 9:20 is fraught with penalties sanctions. It’s just “we have it that way”.

All these differences as a whole can be reduced to the fact that firstly, this is another area - construction, where they work with, so to speak, material objects, as well as break spears in the battles for tenders and orders and have a very big responsibility. Secondly, in the company, predominantly older people belonged to the very generation X, which looks with bewilderment at the antics of the generations Y and Z. And the other generation - these are different values. Such companies operate according to strict rules worked out over the years, and attempts to change this in the direction of IT “fashion and youth” are usually found in their perplexity and resistance, as this business is tough and harsh and is managed by completely different people than they rule in the IT industry. Who worked in such places, knows that in large Russian corporations there is an incredible rigidity, and in order to radically change such structures, half of the old staff will have to be fired, because retraining them in another way will simply not work.

As a result, Katya returned to Veeam, although the decision was not easy for her. She was worried that she couldn’t enter the same river twice, and she perceived her return as in a sense a defeat. But the technical support team was only happy to see her again, and during her time in the construction business, she had accumulated a large amount of energy and ideas that she immediately rushed to implement, for example, organized a hackathon, the report of which can be read here . Maybe in the future, Veeam will also become stiff and turn into a clumsy corporate dinosaur, where initiatives are being introduced with creak and resistance, but now, in the phase of active growth, any employee has the opportunity to show and develop himself both vertically and horizontally.

Of the positive aspects of working in large manufacturing companies, one can note, for example, an understanding of how to build processes. So, Alexandra, one of our returned HR workers, used to go to the real brewery and said that from the point of view of the processes and procedures everything was fine-tuned, adjusted and worked like a clock. While fashionable youth IT specialists tried to scrape the chaos reigning from them and invented all sorts of bicycles and crutches for this, there they thought up, organized and organized everything for a hundred years.

“Why didn't you stay there?” - I asked.
- And they have everything there cyclically, of course, slowly and ... boring. - She replied, - We have a movement here, we are constantly running somewhere, changing the old, learning the new, and all this is very addictive. And then go and try to change something ... In general, we have the freedom and the ability to do something, make some changes, somehow influence. That's why I came back, but this vision of how to organize some things turned out to be very valuable.

When asked about doubts about the return, she replied that not only did she have no doubts, she also lured one of her colleagues from Vera in Veeam!

Well, I would like to finish a series of reviews of large Russian companies outside the IT sector with a direct uncensored quote from our designer, who had the “happiness” to work with one large and fabulously rich Russian corporation:
“Nightmare micromanagement, taste and total failure in time management. It is not clear how these people work in general, and how they function. ”

A little contrary to the previous statement about the built processes, but what to do. Different places, different departments, different people.

Such a different IT

Okay, more or less sorted out with big companies outside the information technology industry, and how are things with other IT people?

In fairness, I’ll say right away that there was a person who, when asked about how his intermediate place of work differed from Veeam, replied: “Nothing. About the same people, about the same task. Unless the office is a bit simpler. ”But there were more interesting stories.

For example, we have a team leader in the development team (C ++ and C #) named Misha and, after working at Veeam for several years, he decided to check his professional relevance and tried to get a job in one of the largest Russian IT companies (the one where many dream to get there). Misha went through a series of interviews and test tasks, and they took him! A dream come true - now he worked in a company with a big name. Working in Veeam, you have to explain every time what we are doing here at all, and if you were taken there, it is enough to casually call That Name Same Name to cause enthusiastic sighs around you.

However, after working a little over a year, Misha came back. And the point is not that the company turned out to be bad, it just turned out to be completely different. And then it's time to talk about the difference between the enterprise, which produces B2B solutions, and the company that develops the service for the end user.

So, Veeam is an enterprise, which means: large release cycles, planning and timing. A lot of time is devoted to a deep understanding of the product and its code, it is very important to catch all the bugs and generally know how and what works, because you cannot roll out a raw product in B2B - customers will quickly go to competitors for such tricks.

And in a new place, Misha encountered a completely different campaign. There they were developing services for the mass user, and it was necessary to issue something new almost every week, and in the afterburner mode. More functional god functional! Give a maximum of gold for a minimum of time! This led to chronic processing, high tempo, heavy workload and the lack of a clear understanding of when it will end. Almost as work on the pipeline, when tasks go in a continuous stream, and there is no sense of completion, as there is no balance between work and life, in which people outside the office have other hobbies. A great place to work for enthusiastic fans of their work, ready to give the profession 146% of themselves (I know a lot of such people, and they are great guys), but if your lifestyle involves something other than professional tasks and rare vacations (in which you also you will work, only to a lesser extent) - such an organization of the work process can become a serious obstacle.

Another difference was the rotation of employees. Misha is used to the fact that development teams are soldered by common projects. These are people you know, you are with them from the first release together and for everything you do, you are responsible too. In the new company, employees were often transferred from one project to another, as a result of which strong and stable teams simply did not have time to form and work together. All this created a feeling of a certain temporality and instability. It was as if everyone came to the company for a while, worked through some period, squeezed out of it, what is possible, while she squeezes what can come out of you, and go somewhere beautiful far away, jingling in her pocket with golden guilders and painting over from sleepless nights gray strands.

A year later, Misha weighed it all in and decided that the measured pace of the enterprise, thoroughness and reliability suited him more than the thrilling pursuit of the maximum of features in a minimum of time, despite the attracting glitter of the golden guilders. And he came back.

The next “returnee” from another IT company is an Internet marketing specialist Vlad, who came to us as a student, and Veeam was his first job. Well, here God himself ordered to go see “as it is in the wild”! And Vlad went to return in three months. As one of the “wills”, one of the St. Petersburg IT-companies engaged in the development of a web-platform acted.

“So what turned out to be wrong that you faded so quickly from them?” - I asked. - They seem to respond well to them.
“The working process is organized in a completely different way,” Vlad replied. “Or rather, not organized.” I'm used to the fact that you clearly know what needs to be done to get some kind of result. You know who to contact, what to read, what procedure to follow, and so on. I would say that our internet marketing department is generally the perfect first place to work, because you learn how the workflow should be organized. And there was no clear process - everyone just runs around, fusses, nothing is clear. Go there, I do not know where, in short. As a result, a lot of time is wasted, you have to linger, you get nervous, and all that jazz. In general, after three months I realized that their style did not suit me, and went to ask for it back.

Alas, none of the employees went to game devs or to the defense industry. Imagine what juicy stories would bring from there. But if someone suddenly appears - we will have a separate interview with him! Among other reasons for the return were these: a new employer promised someone a managerial position and ambitious tasks, but in the end did not give either one or the other. Someone was in a company where tasks were generally tight, and YouTube was tired of watching all day. The girl who worked as a system administrator, went to a complex and interesting project, but as soon as it ended, it turned out that other similar tasks were no longer foreseen, and those that remained were frankly dull.

Toward the close, I’ll tell you about my personal experience. For eight years of work, I myself, of course, went to interviews in other places — at least not even to lose tone — and saw what was being offered there and how it would have to work. For example, at an interview in one large public sector a potential leader said:

- I would describe our work as follows: imagine that you are traveling in a train that is late and that is burning. Here we are all going every day in this burning train!

Sounds enticing, isn't it? Hey guys, do not want a ride in a burning train? We have here considered to be normal to write working letters at four in the morning, to sit every day from eight in the morning until ten in the evening, and at the same time, we still do not have time , haha! E - efficiency!

One gets the impression that all employees there have developed the “Stockholm syndrome”, and they seriously believe that people only dream of working in such a mode.

Summarizing

As you can see, the reasons for leaving the new employer (or not going to him at all) were different, but it’s interesting that people decided to return to Veeam and not go to the next new horizons. Therefore, at the end of the interview I asked everyone:
- Why did you decide to return? Why did not try to go somewhere else?

And, answering this question, everyone talked about the same thing (there will be some kind of a minute of Veeam advertising, but we are in the corporate blog, it’s supposed to be here):

• A professional and friendly team - everyone said this at all, using such words as “family”, “friends”, “second university” and so on.
• There is a sense of stability and reliability. One girl even described it as “there is a feeling that I will meet my old age, in a good way”.
• Interesting tasks, the ability to change something and somehow influence the situation.
• There is where to grow and from whom to learn.

As for me, after I talked with all those who had left and returned, my desire to change jobs was diminished only because I “stayed behind”, and those beautiful pictures that I painted to myself before these interviews faded and became closer to reality . In general, today I made for myself the following conclusion: you need to appreciate your tits and choose the right cranes, my friends, for the wrong ones can lead you to a burning train, to a conveyor belt or to a factory of heavy machines and destinies, and from there go and then choose .

And on this joyful note, I end this article.

Although no, one more thing in the end.

If it became interesting to you, and you are courageous, dexterous and skillful, then the list of jobs for Veeam can be found here - careers.veeam.ru

Now for sure.

Until we meet again, guys and girls!

UPD: By the way, share how many people returned to your company? It is interesting to know how common this practice is.