Why work at ABBYY? Part two

I continue the song started in the first part .

So, if the work is normal, what else can the company offer to its employees? The fact is that ABBYY is a unique society (aka team), something akin to a good friendly student group that spends time together with pleasure and enviable ingenuity together during and after school.

What is unique? For starters - hobby groups. It is believed that even the regional House of Pioneers would envy their diversity.
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For example, we have climbers, cyclists (I was more surprised not that winter tires are not cheap for automobiles, but that they exist in the world) and a whole clan of canoeists walking around the whole year ( wrote in more detail here ). A few more shelves are completely overwhelmed with boxes of all sorts of board games, and the walls are hung with collected five thousand and more puzzles (read more here ). By the way, our technologists have come up with some complicated algorithms, how to quickly assemble them, but do not give anyone a secret. Table football stands in the lobby, and even the company championship was held with great success even twice. Ordinary football, for which either an open field or a gym is rented, used to gather up to twenty people. Now it’s smaller, and we need the players, so if you say at the interview that you are playing football, it will be great, even if you don’t enroll you automatically in our slim ranks.

Football is a classic, but the last year the “fashionable trend” is the mafia, which is played according to the so-called “club rules”, something like this . A very democratic approach to the recruitment of participants (free registration on a separate page on the internal portal) allows you to gather representatives of completely different departments and levels of hierarchy from trainee programmers to top managers at one table.

Of the most serious hobbies are internal courses in foreign languages ​​(from traditional English to Chinese traditional) and public speaking courses.

There are also many activities of various sizes. For example, every year, just February 23 and March 8, just go brilliantly. It is very hard to imagine that people from under a stick would prepare absolutely amazing numbers and programs, invent and publish whole newspapers and books devoted to the other - strong or beautiful - half of the company. I personally like it, but I will not impose my opinion, you can see for yourself - there are posts about these holidays in the company's official blog, that is, here and here (bonus for attentive: be sure to follow this link, there (1.5 meters of pictures) ta-a -What a girlfriend!). About the birthday of the company, finally replacing the traditional trips of the entire company for a weekend out of town, you can’t tell a lot of interesting things, since it is quite corporate. Separate divisions regularly carry out teambuildings - these are such mini-corporate parties, often in the fresh air (fishing!) Or at least just somehow unusual. For example, a couple of years ago a team from one of the products held a curling tournament. It was unusual, of course, but it turned out that ice, mop and brick are very cool. Well, the most private and frequent celebrations are the birthdays of employees, their children, the purchase of cars and other real estate. On this occasion, the employee can write a letter to a wide range of people, inviting them to share their joy over a cup of tea, and many colleagues will gladly come, as the hero of the occasion is affixed with cakes, sandwiches, pies, different juices - who have enough imagination. “Chewing and chatting” (C) at five in the evening is one of the oldest traditions in the company.

If, for all that, there is little live communication, you can discuss working, near-work or non-working questions in an internal forum. If it is not clear who exactly can ask the sore question (“Well, when will they finally make bicycle parking next to the office ?!”), there is a question-answer service when the question is posted in a special form on the portal (you can even anonymously) A specially trained person resolves the question and finds the person to whom this question really needs to be asked, gets an answer and publishes it on the portal along with the question. Even from the discussion on the portal, an entire initiative group has come up on inventing and developing ideas, so that the company could still be developed or where to put it into practice. Such is the mini-committee on modernization. We are not so easy to listen to the Guarantor, we also act. However, our committee has no results yet, we are waiting for them strenuously.

This post is not without reason turned out so long. He gives a detailed answer to the original question “why?”, And the summary will be like this: because working at ABBYY does not only prevent you from living fully, the work itself turns into a pleasant addition to your usual life. The wording at first glance is quite controversial, but after several years of work in the company for some reason it seems to me to be very correct.

Konstantin Tarachev
Head of Mobile Linguistic Applications Development Group