May 3, 2017 at 23:01We do not live and work in capitals: the software development market in Nizhny Novgorod
Nizhny Novgorod. Photo by Stanislav Kaznov
Most recently, I first visited Innopolis, if anyone had not heard, the “Russian Silicon Valley”. At the event in which I participated, slides were presented about the possibility of relocation of IT-specialists in Russia and, in particular, a slide with the cities most attractive for moving. The first two places in it turned out to be obvious, but then there was a place for questions. Krasnodar took the third place, the fourth - Novosibirsk, followed by Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan. The distribution of the last two cities caused almost indignation among the audience why Nizhny was higher. There were three people from Nizhny Novgorod at the event, we did not make excuses, although such a distribution was obvious to me.
In Russia, companies working in the field of software development are mostly located in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and there is no arguing with this. A lot is written about these cities, and metropolitan companies more often fall into various ratings. However, in addition to the two capitals, we also have several relatively large centers of concentration of the development companies. I am sure that many will be at least curious to learn about the state of the development market in the regions of the country, and compilers of ratings will definitely learn a lot.
I will tell you about Nizhny Novgorod, one of the five largest IT cities in Russia. Unfortunately, you will not find any official statistics or simply data on the number of specialists working in the regions, but the place occupied is confirmed by indirect data from various sources. By the number of resumes and vacancies in the professional areas “Programming, Development” and “Testing” posted on hh.ru for the last month, Nizhny Novgorod ranks 5th after Moscow, St. Petersburg, Moscow Region and Novosibirsk. On LinkedIn, Nizhny Novgorod ranks sixth after Moscow, St. Petersburg, Moscow Region, Novosibirsk Region, and Sverdlovsk Region in the number of profiles of specialists in the Computer Software and Information Technology and Services industries (LinkedIn locations coincide with the country's administrative-territorial division, i.e. . a professional network considers users not by city, but by region). In one of the few foundIn 2016, Nizhny Novgorod took the 60th place in the ratings of outsourcing world centers and became one of the three Russian cities that fell into it (St. Petersburg took the 37th place, and Moscow the 64th place) and this is a very worthy result for the city. In my estimation, at present, 8-10 thousand specialists working in software development work in the Volga capital - development, testing engineers, business and system analysts, project managers (my vision differs from the official data of the Ministry of Communications and Microsoft, which totaled more than 350 thousand professional developers in Russia at the beginning of the tenth). Let's see what they all do.
Specialization of Nizhny Novgorod companies
Nizhny Novgorod can rightfully be called one of the centers of international IT outsourcing and software development. The city has the widest range of companies in terms of size and geography of work, specialization and technology. Unlike other locations, Nizhny definitely has its own “face”: the main players in the market are not small web and mobile development studios, not state-owned companies, but large companies that develop serious products, develop development tools and research projects. The areas of activity of development centers in Nizhny Novgorod are really diverse: there are projects related to mobile development, including mobile device development at the level of HW-platforms, web development, projects are being implemented in telecom, banking, billing projects, in the field of Big Data and IoT solutions, many automotive projects, projects related to computer vision, VR and AR, neural networks and machine learning. There is also the development of hardware and related software.
MERA office on the street Business. Photo MERA Intel office on the street Turgenev. Photo by A. Lis
Harman office on the street. Salgan. Photo by HARMAN BC “Orbita” on the street. Nartova. Auriga Photos
The largest software companies in Nizhny Novgorod now are MERA with more than 1300 employees, Intel with more than 700 employees, HARMAN with 600 employees, NetCracker with 300+ employees and MFI Soft with the same 300+ employees. The table below shows the 20 largest companies and describes their specialization. Of the well-known in Russia in Nizhny Novgorod, Yandex, Mail.ru, Tinkoff Bank, GameInsight, Luxoft, Auriga, ROI, First Line Software, Positive Technologies, Artezio and LANIT - BP, Bell Integrator opened their offices , “Jet Infosystems”, “IT”, “Sberbank-Technologies”. In total, there are more than 150 companies in the city whose main activity is software development.
Over the past few years, news on the local market has appeared one after another. In the city, NetCracker and Sberbank-Technology offices opened and a whole scattering of smaller companies. Intel started optimizing and concentrating all the development in Nizhny Novgorod, and then announced the purchase of the Nizhny Novgorod company ItSeez - a developer in the field of computer vision. Outsourcer Teleca was purchased by HARMAN, the manufacturer of automotive embedded systems and audio equipment, which in turn has just become part of the huge Samsung. Amazon acquired the small 2lemetry, another opencascade acquired by Capgemini. MERA grew into an international holding, went beyond Nizhny Novgorod and opened offices in Kazan, Belgrade (Serbia) and Santa Clara (USA), and then moved its headquarters to Zurich, Switzerland. Not without loss:
The main news of this year has already become the opening of Tinkoff Bank and Luxoft development offices. Another noteworthy news was the organization of the startup development office “Dodo Pizza” based on the Nizhny Novgorod company SmartStep group. It will be interesting to see who is next.
| Largest software companies in Nizhny Novgorod | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Title | Specialization | Number of employees | ||
| MERA | Custom software development for telecommunications, automotive, retail, medical, energy and other companies | 1300 | ||
| Intel | Development in the field of computer vision and machine learning, multimedia, IoT, tools for developers | 700 | ||
| HARMAN | Development of automotive embedded systems, IoT, mobile devices and for mobile devices | 600 | ||
| IFI Soft | Development of information security systems, traffic filtering and legal control systems, antifraud systems | 330 | ||
| Netcracker | Development of OSS / BSS, SDN / NFV solutions for telecom operators | 310 | ||
| Tecom | Software development in the field of broadcasting and telecommunications | 160 | ||
| Auriga | Application and system software development for high-tech, medical, automotive companies | 160 | ||
| Seldon | Development of information and analytical systems | 150 | ||
| Five9 | Cloud Call Center Development (SaaS) | 130 | ||
| Transset | Development of ERP, OSS and CMMS solutions | 130 | ||
| Artezio | Custom software development in the field of enterprise-wide information systems, web-development | 85 | ||
| Sberbank Technologies | Bank software development | 80 | ||
| OS33 | Development of enterprise applications and solutions | 80 | ||
| First line software | Custom software development in the industrial, financial, technological fields, for state-owned companies | 80 | ||
| Game insight | Game development | 80 | ||
| SVTekNN | Development of automotive multimedia solutions | 70 | ||
| Yandex | Development of services Yandex.Browser, Yandex.Maps | 70 | ||
| New Communication Technologies | Development of multimedia solutions, mobile and web development | 65 | ||
| ROI | Custom software development | 60 | ||
| Intech global | Development of solutions in the field of mobile commerce, digital content, IoT | 60 | ||
| Tinkoff Bank plans to have an office of 50-100 employees, Luxoft - 80 employees | ||||
Educational institutions and training opportunities
Nizhny Novgorod boasts two excellent higher education institutions that train software developers. The first of them is Nizhny Novgorod State University. N. I. Lobachevsky (NNSU), the second - Nizhny Novgorod State Technical University. R. E. Alekseeva (NSTU). The Institute of Information Technologies, Mathematics and Mechanics graduates from NNGU of specialized specialists, and the Institute of Radio Electronics and Information Technologies at NSTU. In addition to these two universities, excellent specialists are graduated from the Higher School of Economics and their Faculty of Informatics, Mathematics and Computer Science, a certain number of specialists are trained by other universities in the region that have opened the corresponding faculties and training courses. In total, more than a thousand technical specialists graduate from local universities every year.
The building of the 2nd building of UNN. Photo Wikipedia The main building of NSTU. Wikipedia Photos
A significant role in the training and retraining of specialists is played by the largest companies closely cooperating with universities. The largest MERA back in 2004 organized the Nizhny Novgorod Institute of Information Technology - the Institute for Advanced Studies and Retraining. Here, according to information on their website, training is provided for schoolchildren, students and adult specialists, 400-500 people graduate a year. Actively developing its programs of cooperation with Intel universities, in Nizhny Novgorod - with UNN. Together with the State University, the corporation organized the Competence Center for Wireless Communication Systems. Several dozens of students undergo internships at Intel annually and gain experience and knowledge that are quoted around the world. In addition, Intel holds an annual summer school, which invites not only students from Nizhny Novgorod universities, but also from other regions. Many of them subsequently receive an offer to become part of the Intel team and move to Nizhny Novgorod. Other companies have their own development and testing schools - HARMAN, NetCracker, Auriga, Tecom. By the way, well-known international companies that are not represented by offices in Nizhny Novgorod cooperate with and develop their schools: in the framework of cooperation with Microsoft, a Competence Center for High Performance Computing is operating, and a Technology Research Center has been created and successfully operating with NVIDIA.
Finally, the community of specialists also contributes to the training. Perhaps the best example is the QA Alliance's free, automated testing schools. This community, organized by enthusiasts, is developing rapidly and is known, including outside Nizhny Novgorod.
Communities, Groups, and Events
As you know, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Perhaps for this reason I have a feeling that the local communities still have room to develop. However, it is gratifying that in the last year, growth is indeed visible. Finally, the number of groups and communities flows into quality. Also, new players who came to the region began to use new formats of interaction between specialists, there is a qualitative improvement in the events held, and the number of participants is growing.
In order to make it easier for various specialists to follow IT events, a single IT52 portal was created. Currently, information on events is distributed to all popular instant messengers using written bots and on social networks. Here is the event site and Vkontakte group. C ++ developers, Java developers , JSNN JavaScript developers, Python developers , game developers, QA Club testing engineers , Google technology fans (where without them!) Created their own independent and relatively independent groups . GDG Nizhny Novgorod , IT HR Nizhny Novgorod IT HR community(where without them - 2!) and others. All these communities and groups regularly hold events of various formats. In addition, [recruiting] events on certain topics and for certain categories of specialists are regularly held by many companies, primarily, relatively recently opened offices. The lack is felt only in the top and mass events with the invitation of foreign speakers and appropriate surroundings. Last year, almost the only such event was the second GDG DevFest, held in December and attracted more than 300 participants.
One of the events of the GDG. Photo GDG RFBL Cup in Nizhny Novgorod. Photo RFBL
Separately, it is worth noting the sports life of the city. Unlike St. Petersburg, where the IT-Dominant company creates an excellent base for holding sports championships, the IT-Spartakiad is annually held in Nizhny Novgorod, organized by one of the industry's enthusiasts. Nikolai Aleksandrovich Zelenov once worked in one of the oldest IT companies in the city - Telma (now HARMAN Connected Services) - and was involved in organizing sports events, and after leaving the company he began to organize the same events on a city scale. The first sports day was organized ten years ago by the three largest companies - MERA, Telma and Intel. Today, from January to April, competitions are held in futsal, basketball, volleyball, badminton, table tennis, rifle shooting, chess, darts in which dozens of local companies participate.
State support for the information technology industry
This part will not be too long. I think that government support for the development of information technology in Nizhny Novgorod is no different from other regions. Of course, initiatives are declared, round tables are regularly gathered, I am sure positive reports are sent upstairs, but the results of the work are not visible. In 2015, the Ankudinovka technopark was built on the outskirts of the city (technoparks were also built in other cities under the same state program as “Creating technology parks in the Russian Federation in the field of high technologies”), which, as declared, will become the center for the development of the industry in the region . However, so far no more or less significant company has yet appeared among its residents. The site of the park lists 12 residentsMost of which are small web and mobile development studios. In my opinion, at the moment the building of the technopark is a good venue for various industry events, for which we will say thanks to our state.
The building of Technopark Ankudinovka. Photo from the website of the Ministry of Communications of Russia
Cost of living and wages
Nizhny Novgorod is far from the most expensive city in Russia and, accordingly, salaries here are not the highest in the country. Incidentally, this is exactly what, along with the number of technical specialists graduating from universities and the total number of companies, has become one of the factors of a high place in the rating from the company Tholons mentioned at the beginning of the article. Nevertheless, if we talk about the salaries of programmers, we can confidently say that they are growing rapidly, far ahead of the average salaries of company employees from other industries. At the same time, competition between the companies led to a wild market situation, when specialists with a couple of years of experience can get more or the same as experienced specialists with five years of experience. Companies opening offices in Nizhny Novgorod, while able to easily offer good conditions and save in comparison with employees in Moscow. At the same time, newcomers are fueling supply growth for long-running companies. Of course, specialists working remotely for Western companies can boast the largest salaries.
The cost of living in Nizhny Novgorod can be found, for example, on the Numbeo website. This is an international resource and Russian cities in it are not so popular, but the data presented in it may well give a general idea of prices. Here are some detailed details about Nizhny Novgorod and a few key lines here.
| Cost of Living in Nizhniy Novgorod | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Restaurants | Avg. | Range | ||
| Meal for 2 People, Mid-range Restaurant, Three-course | 1,700.00 rub | 1,000.00-2,000.00 | ||
| Utilities (Monthly) | Avg. | Range | ||
| Basic (Electricity, Heating, Water, Garbage) for 85m2 Apartment | 6,083.16 rub | 5,000.00-8,500.00 | ||
| Sports And Leisure | Avg. | Range | ||
| Fitness Club, Monthly Fee for 1 Adult | 2,025.90 rub | 1,126.63-3,000.00 | ||
| Rent Per Month | Avg. | Range | ||
| Apartment (1 bedroom) in City Center | RUB 19,059.18 | 15,000.00-22,532.64 | ||
| Buy Apartment Price | Avg. | Range | ||
| Price per Square Meter to Buy Apartment in City Center | $ 78,666.67 | 70,000.00-100,000.00 | ||
| Price per Square Meter to Buy Apartment Outside of Center | 55,000.00 rub | 50,000.00-65,000.00 | ||
| These data are based on 541 entries in the past 12 months from 32 different contributors. Last update: April, 2017 | ||||
Talking about salaries is a thankless task. I already mentioned that the market can be called wild and the spread in the income received by experts similar in experience is very large, but for the sake of completeness, let's try to give an estimate. The numbers will be more or less relevant for professionals working in the office full time.
| Specialist experience | Scope of salary, rub. |
|---|---|
| Junior Development Engineer, 0.5+ years | 25000-35000 |
| Development Engineer, 1+ years | 40000-70000 |
| Senior Development Engineer / Lead Development Engineer, 5+ years | 80000-160000 |
| Architect, 11+ years old | 120000-230000 |
| Junior Test Engineer, 0.5+ years | 20000-30000 |
| Test Engineer, 1+ years | 35000-50000 |
| Senior Test Engineer / Lead Test Engineer, 5+ years | 55000-100000 |
| Project Manager, 8+ years | 120000-230000 |
Instead of a conclusion
Despite the serious differentiation of the development market in Russia with a serious bias towards the capitals, it pleases that Nizhny Novgorod does not stand still. The city has a lot of companies working in the latest “hot” areas, new players come to the city every year, the connectedness of communities and the IT ecosystem as a whole is growing rapidly. Of the negative factors, I would note the lack of attention to the development of the industry by the state and the insufficient development of the city itself as an attractive place of residence. Many recognize that the city has great potential in terms of tourism, but as a resident I will say that it is not used enough. It’s very nice to see the appearance of top events of the all-Russian and even international scale, such as the Alfa Future People electronic music festival or the Volga Swim sports event, but I would like to see the work of the state again. It is hoped that future big events (the World Cup in 2018 and the 800th anniversary of the city in 2021) will transform the city. Nizhny Novgorod in its history passed a remarkable path - it was a fortress on the outskirts of the country, became a trading capital, turned into a major industrial center - and now it would be logical to see it as a large IT-city. We will see. turned into the largest industrial center - and now it would be logical to see it as a large IT-city. We will see. turned into the largest industrial center - and now it would be logical to see it as a large IT-city. We will see.