Why work at ABBYY? Part one

The first part of the detailed answer promised in my previous post . The second will follow a bit later (update: read the second here ).

So let's go. What for? Then, what's not boring here. This is among other things. When work does not interfere with life, but rather brings a very pleasant variety into it, it does not seem burdensome at all. I will try to disclose this statement and just tell you what is happening with us. You look, and people will reach us.

Those who come to us are guaranteed warm clothes and hot foodalmost a free work schedule, a gym in the office, good fitness 5 minutes walk from the office, the opportunity to learn English with a native speaker, quite decent salaries (yes, this post is also just about them in passing) and other minor joys of life, like in all normal companies.

But, of course, not only these things prevent us from getting bored. We have other mechanisms for this. The people are not completely stewed, and actively communicate between departments, figuring out who can steal the code, who does what, and how to solve a particular problem using the experience already gained.

Next up are workshops for developers. Questions - from acquaintance with new capabilities of basic libraries, new techniques and technologies (for example, the use of XML and XSLT - just don’t tell me that they are not new :) to good and bad design patterns. Of course, seasoned programmers there are often more for hanging out, but it is interesting to them, for young people such seminars are generally very useful. And they teach us for a reason. Those who successfully multiply and apply their knowledge usually grow quite quickly. Trainees for one and a half to two years can reach the level of the head of the development team and get in their possession some kind of complex subsystem or even a whole small product.

Those who, besides the technical ones, also show managerial skills, can go even further. In the end, we have almost all the key management positions in the company held by former programmers (almost all department directors, for example, and even a findirector). Rumor has it that even our current CEO once programmed. Even if the ability to run with a whip is not attractive, you can continue to "go to tech", as gamers say. That is, to confirm more and more high skills in the programming part. This procedure is called certification: you send the code of the special commission, it is evaluated by two experts, more titled than the certified one, they give an assessment, the commission makes a decision on its basis - and voila, hello, a new level of consumption of material goods. By the way, without confirmation of a good qualification, they will not be allowed to steer something serious, so this thing is not only monetary, but also significant professionally. By the way, no one will force a qualified programmer to manage other programmers against his will, so certification of harm does not cause harm in any case.

And we also have St. George’s Daythe possibility of a fairly free transition between projects. If a person is tired of what he is doing, but what is happening in the next department is interesting, then he will most likely be met and transferred. True, if there is someone to hand over the affairs, and in the receiving department there is work. But so far, in a shift by a project employee every three to four years, no one is particularly opposed, so the internal recruiting mechanism is working quite well.

Projects, projects ... and what kind of projects, you ask. In general, the work of programmers in a company has two main areas: technology and products. The first is a painstaking, complex, but very interesting way of expressing oneself. Very smart and enthusiastic people work here. They constantly think with their heads, read smart books and wrinkle their foreheads. The output is the next version of technology, which, although a little (and sometimes very decently), but surpasses the previous one. As I understand it, it is primarily vocation that makes me work here, first of all, a consciousness of involvement in the development of science, albeit applied. In general, this is interesting. This area includes various engines for recognition, document analysis, image processing, export - all of them relate to OCR / ICR, and a wide range of linguistic projects, about which without special knowledge it will be hard for me to tell. An example is dictionary engines and morphology.

It is clear that technology is not a self-sufficient thing, it is a necessary basis for the second direction - grocery. There, of course, they make software products, both for the end user (Lingvo, FineReader, PDF Transformer, mobile products) and for developers (Engine, Recognition Server, Mobile OCR). Here, in addition to a large selection of projects, there is also a wider variety of tasks within each project. Someone is interested in making beautiful windows, someone likes and knows how to design the internal structure of the project. Constantly there are problems that no one has yet solved. For example, to integrate with SharePoint, to integrate the recognition engine in MFPs, to make a mobile product on a new platform. Plus it’s clear for whom this is all done: here is the released product, but its users on the Internet are discussing.

In short, then. Someone will say that all this activity is standard for a programmer working in a software company. This is true, no one argues. But this is only what relates directly to work. And there is also the underwater part of the iceberg, and it will be discussed in my next post, that is, in the second part of the answer.

Konstantin Tarachev
Head of Mobile Linguistic Application Development Group

UPD. For a few, but persistent requests, a link to how to get to us . Plus a list of open vacancies .