How do IT professionals work? Igor Myzgin, Servers.ru

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    We continue to question specialists about work and leisure routines, professional habits, the tools they use, and much more.

    It will be interesting to find out what unites them, in which they contradict each other. Perhaps their answers will help to identify some general patterns, useful tips that will help many of us.

    Today our guest is Igor Myzgin, a specialist in interaction with key partners and clients of Servers.ru. He does not work in the office, he has an irregular schedule. Igor is the first holder of the MCSE: Security 2003 certificate in Russia.

    What do you do in the company?

    I try to give customers who need a full list of hosting services the opportunity to take advantage of our entire ecosystem.

    We offer our customers hosting all over the world. This is America, Europe, Asia, Russia. We are constantly evolving. Soon we will have South America. We rent physical and virtual servers, we provide services based on our own CDN provider, we provide IP transit services to those who need really a lot of traffic. We also provide colocation in the form of racks. We are ready to offer all this all over the world, in any quantities.

    My task is to understand the needs of the client, to understand how to optimize his expenses, to identify the range of tasks that our service should solve. I need to develop such a project with the client so that everything works for the client, so that it fits into the existing or planned budget.

    After that, I perform the function of the “lawyer” of the client inside the holding. I’m trying to understand the business model of the client, and on this basis, find out how the client sees us and why we can be needed, how we can be useful.

    One phrase (phrase) that best describes how you work:

    Catch a wave.

    How many hours a day do you devote to work?

    Complex issue. I do not have an office where I come at 9 am, turn on the laptop, and at 18:00, respectively, turn it off. I can, relatively speaking, work on the night of Saturday to Sunday, but I can go somewhere on Wednesday about my business on Wednesday afternoon.

    How many hours do you sleep?

    It depends. I slept 4 hours yesterday, today - 7.

    Do you have breakfast?

    Not always. Usually, my breakfast is just instant coffee without sugar and without milk.

    What do you do on the way to / from work?

    If I'm driving, I’m talking on the phone. If I go by public transport, then I do something in my laptop.

    Which todo manager do you personally use?

    Notebook A4 on a metal braid for 200-400 sheets weighing a kilogram and a pen. Experience shows that this is the best option for individual use. She is also non-volatile (laughs).

    What task manager / issue-tracker / repository do you use?

    Since my position is communication and management, I do not use these products. I know that we have JIRA, RT and Confluence.

    Since we are guys from the 90s, we have been living on a corporate Jabber server for a long time. Recently, a miracle happened and we stepped from the 20th century to the 21st: we have an internal HipChat server. Now we can send emoji to each other or attach. Now we have more room chats. This is very cool and allows you to arrange a discussion of projects by a team in which people are scattered in 3-4 countries (laughs).

    What tools, frameworks do you use for development?

    About frameworks - yes they are, but the developers ... And I'm the manager.

    We are a “small” company: we exist in 10 countries. We conduct local relationships in almost 10 currencies, we have a certain number of legal entities in different jurisdictions.

    For management and financial accounting we use SAP R3. But in SAP we mainly have a financial director, a group of accountants, and thank God, I do not live in SAP.

    Our company has an internal development, CRM-system. It includes an inventory manager, ERP, which manages hosting as a business. This is a self-made combine that automates the hosting business, which is conducted on several continents, with different counterparties. It also integrates the management of several of our products.

    Does your company have any internal projects, libraries, and why were they created?

    We are constantly accumulating experience together with our customers, and often this experience is structured as a separate project and product. So it used to be with cloud storage. This year, the infrastructure for the Prisma.AI application became such a project for us. From the first days, the application has been working and developing at our facilities around the world. And this year, together with the Prism team, this year we learned to grow exponentially, doubling and tripling every week or two the number of servers. We managed to find a solution that allows adding power very quickly, remaining at that time tens of times more productive and several times cheaper than, say, AWS. As a result, based on the infrastructure that our team then developed specifically for Prisma AI, the idea was born to create a new product - Prisma Cloud.

    Now all our clients can get physical or virtual servers with graphic coprocessors and effectively build applications that work with machine learning / neural networks.

    That is, for you, internal projects are not something special?

    This is an ongoing process: new technologies appear, we always create and implement something. Just a few years ago, Docker appeared. We began to look and figure out how to integrate it with our developments for those customers who would like to use it. This was also an internal project, which then became a standard product option.

    Or, for example, colleagues went to the next OpenStack summit. As a result, we have another project to analyze the feasibility of migrating modules to current generations, and in the end it will turn into something at the product level.

    We also have purely internal projects, such as the migration of SAP R3 to S4 / HANA. That is, we have a lot of internal projects, and they often become new client services.

    What annoys you the most when you work?

    First, you start to freak out that all people think differently. Then you understand that it must be accepted as an axiom, and it ceases to enrage. I learned to put up with things like that.

    Of course, there are some nuances: we have a distributed company, so everyone is in different time zones. If you need to call Dallas, and there at this time 4 in the morning, then call there is pointless. Also, you do not always know where this or that employee is now and what is his local time. A person can be in Singapore and there +5 hours, maybe in Dallas and there -8 from Moscow, and maybe in Cyprus, and there -1. But raving about it is also pointless. This is just such a feature when the business is done all over the "ball".

    What kind of professional literature would you recommend?

    Just to share an interesting observation: if a person is less than 30 years old, he usually did not read the three-volume Knut. Although the book is still relevant and cannot be very outdated, the algorithms do not become outdated. Now, it may not be relevant to write in Assembler, but it is still worthwhile to have an idea about assemblers and the low-level operation of iron. So, there is no universal literature, but there is a certain fundamental set of books on basic things, which is different for each area. DBA is worth reading to Codd, Knuth programmers, and sysadmins can read RFC. About 15 years ago, one smart person told me: "Read the RFC, everything is written there." And this advice is not outdated in 15 years.

    What do you prefer: electronic readers or paper books?

    Tired of the poor quality of electronic readers. A long time ago I read paper books. Then, 15 years ago, I got a Palm 3E (16 shades of gray, 2 MB of memory). Gradually, I still realized that I need to read paper books, because in our country there are no readers that do not kill the normal formatting of the text.

    What equipment (computers, tablets, smartphones) and operating systems do you prefer at work and at home?

    Mac computer, Windows on a virtual machine, iOS and Android smartphones, iOS tablet.

    Our company’s corporate standard is Apple. In general, we have approximately 270 employees in 10 countries, but there are a dozen of those who use Microsoft products in their daily work. But to see Linux on an Apple laptop is more than a typical story from our developers.

    Do you listen to music when you work?

    Yes of course. This allows you to be distracted from what is happening around. So I put on my headphones, turn on the soft music that I know and love. Then I immerse myself in it and work quietly.

    Which life hack allows you to be more effective?

    The most standard trick is to come up with a task in the morning that you definitely need to do, do it, and then everything else.

    What applications and services can you do without in work or in your personal life?

    Facebook In general, you can do without everything, but the degree of comfort is reduced.

    What would Igor Myzgin write 10 years ago in a letter to the future to himself?

    There is a problem: I am 35. I do sales without diving into technology platforms. 10 years ago, I was a systems architect at Microsoft's technology stack. I am the first holder of the MCSE: Security 2003 certificate in Russia, because I was just the first to pass one of the exams at Prometric. I was the first to upload this exam to Russian servers to pass it (laughs). Therefore, I do not know what advice that person can give me.

    You have come a long way. And someone is now at the beginning of this path. What would you recommend to a person trying to go the same way?

    If parents say that now they need to be a PHP developer or accountant, this is all opportunistic. Instead, you just need to find what drives you and try to do it. You can be anyone and make a living from it. If this process drives you, you need to develop in this direction. After all, money is paid for professionalism.

    If this activity drives you, you will become a pro in any industry. And if you work because it is prestigious or your parents said that you will be the chief accountant, and you feel sick from it, you will not reach a high level, and as a result you will not be paid serious money for it. The axiomatics here are simple.

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