Get a programmer at ABBYY.howto

Thanks to Habranoda for warm welcome, comments and pluses to our first post. It is very pleasant to realize that both you (those who wrote comments) and us (those who are at the origins of the ABBYY blog on Habré) are concerned about the same things. We were going to answer most of the questions that were asked in the comments in our first posts. So, wait in the very near future for our stories about how our office looks and lives, what kind of “unknown” products we produce, what projects ABBYY is engaged in and much more interesting. And right now, I offer you a guide-guide from my colleague on how to become part of our friendly team!

Suppose that you are a programmer by profession, or you want to become one, and at the same time want to work at ABBYY. What awaits you after sending a resume to the company?

Let's start from the very beginning - from vacancies : there are always places for both experienced programmers and students who just wrote “Hello, world!” At the Lab in Visual Basic. At the same time, the company, for the most part, is not in a hurry to hire people at any cost, but is looking for those who are able right now, or in the future, to strengthen the team. This approach has been applied since the company was founded, and it is thanks to it that successful and competitive products have appeared and are developing. “People are our everything” (CEO, he is the general director). At the same time, capable senior students who have at least small achievements in programming have a very high chance of finding a job and being trained in a company with the subsequent work on a commercial product. This is because the company is primarily focused on educating personnel from scratch in its environment, which gives good results. However, for experienced programmers the way to the company is not ordered, just the requirements are significantly higher.

Now about the summary. They are pretty ordinary - you can fill out a form on the website or send an email to resume@abbyy.com or job@abbyy.com . Programmers with experience should immediately attach samples of their code (the higher qualifications you declare, the more complex and high-quality the code should be), for “students”, that is, applicants without experience, this is not required. Then you need to wait a bit - recruitment specialists (aka HR managers), although we have very frisky guys, they also need time to evaluate what should be done with a specific resume. Of course, there is always a minimal but non-zero chance that your profile will be lost by a suddenly rebooted mail server, or it will be removed by an evil sleepy admin anti-spam filter, so if you haven’t received a letter within 24 hours that the questionnaire has been accepted, you need to retry. If the summary seemed interesting to our personnel officers, they contact you and invite you for an interview. Usually, a prospective job seeker is contacted within a few days after submitting a resume. However, if they didn’t immediately answer that there was no chance, they could bring up a resume even after weeks and months, and call - this happens, for example, if a vacancy is opened for which the applicant may be suitable.

Well, they invited me for an interview. How does it work? First, it can be quite long. From one to five hours, depending on the success of the applicant. It all starts with solving several “smart” tasks (“A piece of ice floats in water in a bucket. How does the water level change when ice melts?”), And algorithmic pairs (quickly - in O (log N) arithmetic operations on numbers - find Nth Fibonacci number). Tasks are given by an HR manager, and he also checks solutions to tasks “for quick wits.” This stage lasts one to two hours, and allows you to assess how much a person can think at all, to cope with standard and non-standard tasks, how to behave in difficult situations - trying to find a solution or giving up quickly if nothing happens. Agree, for a programmer, an important enough skill is to always find a working solution. If everything is good, an expert from among programmers is connected to the interview, who checks the solution of algorithmic problems and also assesses the professional suitability of the applicant, talking to him about the content of his resume, and also proposing to solve additional algorithmic problems. By the way, here it is worth noting that for “students” it is more important how well they solve problems - this shows their potential, and for programmers with experience it is more important how well their experience is suitable for use in a company, although they should be pretty well solved tasks. This part of the interview, which can last from an hour to three, is the most important, because the expert's opinion, which he represents after the interview with the personnel department, becomes the main assessment of the applicant. At least, I do not know anything about cases of employment with a clearly negative expert reaction.
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So, passed this barrier. Then the HR-manager can offer you an interview with the future immediate supervisor - the project manager. Most often, this conversation takes place immediately after a conversation with an expert, but sometimes, if you do not immediately meet with the manager, you are scheduled to meet in a few days. The project manager will be interested, first of all, in how you approach the vacancy in his department. Very similar to an interview with an expert, only smaller tasks, and the conversation is more about practice. It is clear that you may not like him, but such is selyavi.

But that's not all, although you are already close to success. Now you will have a meeting with the head of the department (aka DPD), or with the technical director (aka CTO), strict but fair, who makes the final decision on hiring the job seeker. This meeting is usually quite short, but intense, and a positive expert assessment from the previous stage does not guarantee anything here, but only helps to form a good impression about you that you need to try not to dispel. But sometimes all the positive reviews go to ashes, and the applicant goes home not having a good taste. And this also happens.

And finally, the final battle meeting. With the head of the security department. For what it is - the most secret military secret. I can not tell, but it will not hurt, except a little bit . In general, as at the reception at the dentist, the main thing is not to be afraid, and everything will be fine.

Now for sure. Level boss passed level up. Under the bravura music HR-manager congratulates you with the successful passage of the entrance test. You discuss the formal aspects of employment with him, and after a while you sign an employment contract. "Welcome to the club!", That is, for "students" - enrollment in the study group, and who with experience immediately get into the working draft.

PS There is a reasonable question: why is all this necessary? Well, that is, why work as a programmer at ABBYY? What is so interesting about this work? We will definitely answer these questions in other interesting posts!

Konstantin Tarachev
Head of Mobile Linguistic Applications Development Group