Interview with Dropbox developer Leonid Vasiliev about work and life in Ireland
Dropbox Site Reliability Engineer Leonid Vasiliev has been living and working in Ireland for four years. Leonid told how he moved to Ireland, why he moved from Amazon to Dropbox, how their office in Dublin is organized, and how he sees the future of DevOps.
Before the move, Leonid graduated from the Moscow State University and worked for five years at Yandex
- Since 2013, you have been living in Dublin. How did you make this important decision? Did you consciously choose the country and company in advance where you want to work, or did you receive an offer that you can’t refuse?
The decision at that moment did not seem important, rather logical. It so happened that I received an offer from Amazon in Dublin and decided to go. Amazon attracted me because the infrastructure of this company is huge, it was interesting to work with AWS services, as well as in an international company.
- What is the difference between the life and work of a developer in Russia and in Ireland?
The main difference that surprised me was that in Ireland it is not customary to recycle. Everyone keeps a balance between personal life and work. Holidays in Ireland are 25 days, while the weekend is not taken into account, so if you take two full weeks of vacation, only 10 days will be taken into account. They work here mainly for American companies. Almost did not see here small web studios, IT solution integrators and small Internet providers.
- Does this mean that Irish companies are able to more efficiently organize the work process?
I don’t think it’s just a very cautious approach to everything related to staff. It is important for the company that employees feel happy.
- Have you encountered something unexpected / unusual in terms of organization of work, life, mentality? How long did you get used to the local life? Is it possible to find buckwheat with sour cream in Dublin or is it necessary to change eating habits?
For a long time I got used to the fact that drinking water from the tap is normal :)
As a rule, the team is very international, it often happens that the team includes all people from different countries. English is a native language for few. When I arrived in Dublin for a face-to-face interview, this was the first time that I spoke to someone in English live on professional topics.
Dublin is a small and quite comfortable city, so it got used pretty quickly. There are many people from Eastern Europe in Ireland - Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, etc. In Dublin, there is a network of Polish shops where there are many varieties of buckwheat and excellent “Chamomile” sour cream. You can also buy herring and pickles there.
- How is it customary to spend free time in Ireland?
In their free time, people usually go to the cinema, to pubs, to concerts, often go to nature. Ireland is a fairly small island, to cross it horizontally you need about 2.5 hours by car. Quite a lot of people are involved in sports. Almost all companies sponsor sports, ranging from discounts to the gym, ending with paying a contribution to the marathon. Water sports such as surfing are popular here. The Irish often go to rugby matches and Gaelic football.
Traveling to Europe is also very affordable from Ireland: the local low-cost airline RyanAir (which is based at the Dublin Airport) can fly to London for 10 euros, and to Portugal for 50.
- Are there corporate parties, how do they go? Do they differ from the usual in Russia?
The so-called Happy Hour is common in companies. Usually it’s a few hours in the evening on Friday, when the company’s dining room has a minibar with drinks.
There are usually two large corporate parties in a year: in December before Christmas and in the summer (Summer Party). At Christmas, they usually rent some large room (for example, a museum or a restaurant), and in the summer everything takes place in a park or on a rugby field. Dropbox also arranges corporate events in the office for Halloween and St. Patrick's Day.
- Is it possible for a Russian developer to get a job in an Irish company? Can you give some advice?
There are very few Irish IT companies, mainly here are branches of companies from America. The interview format is standard among all companies. It’s relatively easy to come to work in Ireland, there are no quotas for work visas (such as for H1B in the USA), you don’t have to pass an English exam (like IELTS when applying for a work visa to the UK). Most often, people with experience who can work in the company independently and do not require constant attention from the manager are brought here. If in 2012 employees were transported only by large and well-known companies, now almost everyone does it.
- Tell me more about this. What documents should be collected and what are the pitfalls? How do employers help with relocation? If not a secret, what kind of relocation package did Amazon offer you?
The rules for moving change quite often. I was issued a work visa in 2012, so a lot could change.
The entire process is supervised by the employer, I was only required to send documents (passport, confirmation of past work in the specialty, transfer of diploma) and sign a contract for work.
The documents were sent via DHL, it took me a couple of months to consider my application, and then a document came from the Irish Ministry of Labor (directly work permit). With this document I received an entry visa at the Embassy of Ireland. In Ireland, I registered with the immigration office and received a multiple-entry visa to travel from Ireland.
Amazon paid for one-way tickets for me and my wife, a corporate apartment for 3 weeks, visas and issued a cash bonus. Often companies offer the service of transporting personal items in a container (through contractors).
- An IT specialist to receive an offer and move seems easy. And what should their wives and children do? How to transport your family with you so that they do not end up locked in 4 walls?
Most often, IT officers get a work permit called Critical Skills Permit - you can move it with your whole family right away. The right to work is obtained only by the one who made the offer, the rest of the family members can simply live in Ireland, study or engage in unpaid volunteering.
In this case, it is not necessary to be officially married. Ireland also recognizes partnerships (here called the Defacto relationship), which must be confirmed by two years of residence together before moving to Ireland. Your partner will not automatically receive a work permit: you will need to find a company that will issue a work permit, but the requirements for such a permit are much simpler than the permission that the main visa holder has.
- Why did you switch from Amazon to Dropbox?
It was interesting to work at Amazon for the first two years, after which the tasks became pretty monotonous. I wanted to move from a company with thousands of developers to a company with hundreds. Initially, I became interested in Dropbox after I went to the EuroPycon 2012 conference, where I found out that Guido van Rossum (the creator of Python) moved from Google there. When I decided to move from Amazon to a smaller company, I was contacted by a former colleague from Yandex and offered to interview for the position of Site Reliability Engineer.
- What do you do in Dropbox?
I am engaged in low-level infrastructure, automation and tools for our data centers and AWS cloud. Also code deployment systems, cluster configuration, etc. Sometimes there are tasks that need to be "dragged" across the entire Dropbox stack, from the OS configuration to the client for MacOS.
- Tell me how everything works in Dropbox? How is your work organized? Do you go to the office?
Dropbox is a fairly young company, only recently out of the startup phase, so the atmosphere in the company is quite informal. I work in a Dublin office. It employs about 250 people, about 10 developers. The company has a lot of ex-Yandex. There are only 10 people in my team. Everyone except me is in New York. I work on Dublin time, which coincides with UTC for most of the year :)
I go to the office by breakfast, by 8-10 in the morning, I do most of the work on projects in the morning. In the afternoon I usually talk with colleagues from New York and San Francisco, discussing tasks and plans. Once every three weeks I am on-call, which means that if Dropbox services are malfunctioning, a “page” (SMS or call) will come to me.
“What is the best and worst part of your work?”
Probably the best is the lack of heavy formal processes and the openness of the company.
I also really like the program that Dropbox runs 2 times a year - Hack Week. During Hack Week, which lasts a week, any developer can work on the project he wants. This can be a personal project or related to work, sometimes people get together and do something together. At last Hack Week, I experimented with various BitTorrent clients and the VCDIFF data compression format.
There is something very bad. Working with remote teams with differences in time zones of 5 and 8 hours, of course, is difficult.
- You are actually doing work at the junction of dev and ops since 2008, you started even before the main hype. What do you think has changed globally over these ten years?
The main changes are, of course, the development of cloud infrastructure, the transition from configuration management systems (CFengine, Puppet, Chef, etc.) to containers (LXC, Docker). SSD and NoSQL also greatly changed the approach to data processing and storage.
- What is primary - infrastructure tools or good practices? Are devops without orchestration frameworks and the like?
I am convinced that the practice + simple automation. The most significant failures, as a rule, occur due to the unreasonable complexity of a process. I take special care with open-source solutions developed by one company and, as a rule, have commercial support only from this company.
- There is an opinion that, taking into account the huge practice of large companies, most devops practices and SRE tools are licked so that new products no longer appear and, apparently, will not appear. Is it so?
Most practices are generally ignored; infrastructure tools are usually barely operational. When a service grows, its infrastructure is constantly changing. I have not seen a single service where there would be too many metrics, for example.
- Where is all this movement should lead us? Imagine on the topic “SRE's everyday life in five years” :)
The number of different services will grow exponentially, the infrastructure will be increasingly local to be as close to the user as possible. More and more services will be forced to support clusters in different countries and regions due to government demands. REST-API will cease to be used. The era of open web is coming to an end. Content will be stored in various services encrypted and available only to trusted users. The transition to IPv6 and HTTP / 2.0 will accelerate.
- What tools do you use to organize work (including time planning, workspace organization, etc.)?
Recently, “Dropbox Paper” for planning, I often write in a notebook on the table some tasks or ideas that come to mind. Talking to Slack and Google Hangouts. Mostly I work in the terminal on macbook'e, I have been using Vim for about 10 years. On a personal laptop I use OpenBSD and WindowMaker. I also use the Kinesis Advantage Keyboard and Contour RollerMouse.
- Do you read any professional blog? What information resources could you recommend to colleagues for the development of skills?
Only Hacker News on a regular basis. I follow the programs of several conferences ACM and IEEE. There is a subscription to O'Reilly Safari Books. I try to study some one topic that interests me, than to follow all the trends in the infrastructure.
- Do you manage to maintain work & life balance? If so, how, if not, do you need it at all?
In Yandex, this was hard, in Amazon and Dropbox it is much easier. As a rule, I stay at work for a couple of hours, but nothing more. Western companies are not very good at processing. For example, when I worked at Amazon, I was studying part-time at the same time and I was able to combine study and work.
Also, much attention is paid to teamwork: planning, design, code review, documentation and metrics. Therefore, if you work alone over the weekend on a task, then most likely the manager will have questions for you.
- Tell me about studying at an Irish magistracy. How is the learning process different? Why did you choose this particular program?
I always dreamed of studying at a western university, the specialty of Cloud Computing was a fairly obvious choice for me, since I worked in a world leader in this industry.
The learning process is radically different. Great emphasis is placed on working with various scientific articles (mainly ACM and IEEE). All tasks are written, downloaded online, all materials are also available online. The university has a great library. Also, the campus is more like an IT company office: we had a lounge with xbox and a small server room where we could experiment with various configurations.
- You have worked in three world-famous companies. What is the most valuable experience (not only professional, but also life) did each of them give you? In such companies, people can work for decades. Why did you choose a different path for yourself?
Decades work units. Probably the most important thing that was not immediately obvious to me was to try to work with more experienced people who work 5, 10, 15 years more than you. Also, when you come to the company, try to start interviewing candidates and be a mentor for interns, this will give a lot of interesting experience that will come in handy in your future career.
On April 14, Leonid will speak at the DUMP conference in Yekaterinburg. He will tell you how, from the SRE point of view, Dropbox implements the foundation of a stable infrastructure, what technologies Dropbox uses, and what difficulties it faces.
Thanks to our sponsors who make the conference possible: the General sponsor is E-Soft , the conference partners are SKB Kontur , Naumen , Sberbank Technologies .
Pictures of Dublin: Masha Vasilieva
Before the move, Leonid graduated from the Moscow State University and worked for five years at Yandex
- Since 2013, you have been living in Dublin. How did you make this important decision? Did you consciously choose the country and company in advance where you want to work, or did you receive an offer that you can’t refuse?
The decision at that moment did not seem important, rather logical. It so happened that I received an offer from Amazon in Dublin and decided to go. Amazon attracted me because the infrastructure of this company is huge, it was interesting to work with AWS services, as well as in an international company.
- What is the difference between the life and work of a developer in Russia and in Ireland?
The main difference that surprised me was that in Ireland it is not customary to recycle. Everyone keeps a balance between personal life and work. Holidays in Ireland are 25 days, while the weekend is not taken into account, so if you take two full weeks of vacation, only 10 days will be taken into account. They work here mainly for American companies. Almost did not see here small web studios, IT solution integrators and small Internet providers.
- Does this mean that Irish companies are able to more efficiently organize the work process?
I don’t think it’s just a very cautious approach to everything related to staff. It is important for the company that employees feel happy.
- Have you encountered something unexpected / unusual in terms of organization of work, life, mentality? How long did you get used to the local life? Is it possible to find buckwheat with sour cream in Dublin or is it necessary to change eating habits?
For a long time I got used to the fact that drinking water from the tap is normal :)
As a rule, the team is very international, it often happens that the team includes all people from different countries. English is a native language for few. When I arrived in Dublin for a face-to-face interview, this was the first time that I spoke to someone in English live on professional topics.
Dublin is a small and quite comfortable city, so it got used pretty quickly. There are many people from Eastern Europe in Ireland - Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, etc. In Dublin, there is a network of Polish shops where there are many varieties of buckwheat and excellent “Chamomile” sour cream. You can also buy herring and pickles there.
- How is it customary to spend free time in Ireland?
In their free time, people usually go to the cinema, to pubs, to concerts, often go to nature. Ireland is a fairly small island, to cross it horizontally you need about 2.5 hours by car. Quite a lot of people are involved in sports. Almost all companies sponsor sports, ranging from discounts to the gym, ending with paying a contribution to the marathon. Water sports such as surfing are popular here. The Irish often go to rugby matches and Gaelic football.
Traveling to Europe is also very affordable from Ireland: the local low-cost airline RyanAir (which is based at the Dublin Airport) can fly to London for 10 euros, and to Portugal for 50.
- Are there corporate parties, how do they go? Do they differ from the usual in Russia?
The so-called Happy Hour is common in companies. Usually it’s a few hours in the evening on Friday, when the company’s dining room has a minibar with drinks.
There are usually two large corporate parties in a year: in December before Christmas and in the summer (Summer Party). At Christmas, they usually rent some large room (for example, a museum or a restaurant), and in the summer everything takes place in a park or on a rugby field. Dropbox also arranges corporate events in the office for Halloween and St. Patrick's Day.
- Is it possible for a Russian developer to get a job in an Irish company? Can you give some advice?
There are very few Irish IT companies, mainly here are branches of companies from America. The interview format is standard among all companies. It’s relatively easy to come to work in Ireland, there are no quotas for work visas (such as for H1B in the USA), you don’t have to pass an English exam (like IELTS when applying for a work visa to the UK). Most often, people with experience who can work in the company independently and do not require constant attention from the manager are brought here. If in 2012 employees were transported only by large and well-known companies, now almost everyone does it.
- Tell me more about this. What documents should be collected and what are the pitfalls? How do employers help with relocation? If not a secret, what kind of relocation package did Amazon offer you?
The rules for moving change quite often. I was issued a work visa in 2012, so a lot could change.
The entire process is supervised by the employer, I was only required to send documents (passport, confirmation of past work in the specialty, transfer of diploma) and sign a contract for work.
The documents were sent via DHL, it took me a couple of months to consider my application, and then a document came from the Irish Ministry of Labor (directly work permit). With this document I received an entry visa at the Embassy of Ireland. In Ireland, I registered with the immigration office and received a multiple-entry visa to travel from Ireland.
Amazon paid for one-way tickets for me and my wife, a corporate apartment for 3 weeks, visas and issued a cash bonus. Often companies offer the service of transporting personal items in a container (through contractors).
- An IT specialist to receive an offer and move seems easy. And what should their wives and children do? How to transport your family with you so that they do not end up locked in 4 walls?
Most often, IT officers get a work permit called Critical Skills Permit - you can move it with your whole family right away. The right to work is obtained only by the one who made the offer, the rest of the family members can simply live in Ireland, study or engage in unpaid volunteering.
In this case, it is not necessary to be officially married. Ireland also recognizes partnerships (here called the Defacto relationship), which must be confirmed by two years of residence together before moving to Ireland. Your partner will not automatically receive a work permit: you will need to find a company that will issue a work permit, but the requirements for such a permit are much simpler than the permission that the main visa holder has.
- Why did you switch from Amazon to Dropbox?
It was interesting to work at Amazon for the first two years, after which the tasks became pretty monotonous. I wanted to move from a company with thousands of developers to a company with hundreds. Initially, I became interested in Dropbox after I went to the EuroPycon 2012 conference, where I found out that Guido van Rossum (the creator of Python) moved from Google there. When I decided to move from Amazon to a smaller company, I was contacted by a former colleague from Yandex and offered to interview for the position of Site Reliability Engineer.
- What do you do in Dropbox?
I am engaged in low-level infrastructure, automation and tools for our data centers and AWS cloud. Also code deployment systems, cluster configuration, etc. Sometimes there are tasks that need to be "dragged" across the entire Dropbox stack, from the OS configuration to the client for MacOS.
- Tell me how everything works in Dropbox? How is your work organized? Do you go to the office?
Dropbox is a fairly young company, only recently out of the startup phase, so the atmosphere in the company is quite informal. I work in a Dublin office. It employs about 250 people, about 10 developers. The company has a lot of ex-Yandex. There are only 10 people in my team. Everyone except me is in New York. I work on Dublin time, which coincides with UTC for most of the year :)
I go to the office by breakfast, by 8-10 in the morning, I do most of the work on projects in the morning. In the afternoon I usually talk with colleagues from New York and San Francisco, discussing tasks and plans. Once every three weeks I am on-call, which means that if Dropbox services are malfunctioning, a “page” (SMS or call) will come to me.
“What is the best and worst part of your work?”
Probably the best is the lack of heavy formal processes and the openness of the company.
I also really like the program that Dropbox runs 2 times a year - Hack Week. During Hack Week, which lasts a week, any developer can work on the project he wants. This can be a personal project or related to work, sometimes people get together and do something together. At last Hack Week, I experimented with various BitTorrent clients and the VCDIFF data compression format.
There is something very bad. Working with remote teams with differences in time zones of 5 and 8 hours, of course, is difficult.
- You are actually doing work at the junction of dev and ops since 2008, you started even before the main hype. What do you think has changed globally over these ten years?
The main changes are, of course, the development of cloud infrastructure, the transition from configuration management systems (CFengine, Puppet, Chef, etc.) to containers (LXC, Docker). SSD and NoSQL also greatly changed the approach to data processing and storage.
- What is primary - infrastructure tools or good practices? Are devops without orchestration frameworks and the like?
I am convinced that the practice + simple automation. The most significant failures, as a rule, occur due to the unreasonable complexity of a process. I take special care with open-source solutions developed by one company and, as a rule, have commercial support only from this company.
- There is an opinion that, taking into account the huge practice of large companies, most devops practices and SRE tools are licked so that new products no longer appear and, apparently, will not appear. Is it so?
Most practices are generally ignored; infrastructure tools are usually barely operational. When a service grows, its infrastructure is constantly changing. I have not seen a single service where there would be too many metrics, for example.
- Where is all this movement should lead us? Imagine on the topic “SRE's everyday life in five years” :)
The number of different services will grow exponentially, the infrastructure will be increasingly local to be as close to the user as possible. More and more services will be forced to support clusters in different countries and regions due to government demands. REST-API will cease to be used. The era of open web is coming to an end. Content will be stored in various services encrypted and available only to trusted users. The transition to IPv6 and HTTP / 2.0 will accelerate.
- What tools do you use to organize work (including time planning, workspace organization, etc.)?
Recently, “Dropbox Paper” for planning, I often write in a notebook on the table some tasks or ideas that come to mind. Talking to Slack and Google Hangouts. Mostly I work in the terminal on macbook'e, I have been using Vim for about 10 years. On a personal laptop I use OpenBSD and WindowMaker. I also use the Kinesis Advantage Keyboard and Contour RollerMouse.
- Do you read any professional blog? What information resources could you recommend to colleagues for the development of skills?
Only Hacker News on a regular basis. I follow the programs of several conferences ACM and IEEE. There is a subscription to O'Reilly Safari Books. I try to study some one topic that interests me, than to follow all the trends in the infrastructure.
- Do you manage to maintain work & life balance? If so, how, if not, do you need it at all?
In Yandex, this was hard, in Amazon and Dropbox it is much easier. As a rule, I stay at work for a couple of hours, but nothing more. Western companies are not very good at processing. For example, when I worked at Amazon, I was studying part-time at the same time and I was able to combine study and work.
Also, much attention is paid to teamwork: planning, design, code review, documentation and metrics. Therefore, if you work alone over the weekend on a task, then most likely the manager will have questions for you.
- Tell me about studying at an Irish magistracy. How is the learning process different? Why did you choose this particular program?
I always dreamed of studying at a western university, the specialty of Cloud Computing was a fairly obvious choice for me, since I worked in a world leader in this industry.
The learning process is radically different. Great emphasis is placed on working with various scientific articles (mainly ACM and IEEE). All tasks are written, downloaded online, all materials are also available online. The university has a great library. Also, the campus is more like an IT company office: we had a lounge with xbox and a small server room where we could experiment with various configurations.
- You have worked in three world-famous companies. What is the most valuable experience (not only professional, but also life) did each of them give you? In such companies, people can work for decades. Why did you choose a different path for yourself?
Decades work units. Probably the most important thing that was not immediately obvious to me was to try to work with more experienced people who work 5, 10, 15 years more than you. Also, when you come to the company, try to start interviewing candidates and be a mentor for interns, this will give a lot of interesting experience that will come in handy in your future career.
On April 14, Leonid will speak at the DUMP conference in Yekaterinburg. He will tell you how, from the SRE point of view, Dropbox implements the foundation of a stable infrastructure, what technologies Dropbox uses, and what difficulties it faces.
Thanks to our sponsors who make the conference possible: the General sponsor is E-Soft , the conference partners are SKB Kontur , Naumen , Sberbank Technologies .
Pictures of Dublin: Masha Vasilieva