Clever Geek Handbook

How I worked for 3 months in Y. Market and quit

First try



It all started with the fact that I like to go to conferences and often go to them at Yandex, Mail.ru and other large companies. Once HR HR from Yandex wrote to me and asked me to do a test for an intern of a front-end developer.



I made it, here it is . By convention, it was supposed to work on iPhones and androids, so I checked it in the Browser Stack and added a couple of prefixes and css styles.



After some time, I realized that I did not want to be an intern, having several years of experience behind me and was flooded into Y. Market through the form on their website .



HR called me and offered to do a skype interview with live coding. Before the interview, I repeated the data structures, the complexity of the algorithms, sorting. Then I did not know that this is not enough.



At the interview, I could not solve the algorithmic problems, I did not know the inside of JS and they shaved me off.



It touched my self-esteem and the whole next year, in parallel with work, I taught JS at a deep level and solved problems on codewars. Here you can evaluate my progress.



Second attempt



Then I already worked in a large telecom company and did not look for work. But HR from Yandex called and offered to get an interview at Y. Market. I didn’t really want to change my work, but I decided that this was a great chance to check my level, because Interviews at Yandex are famous for their complexity and furiousness.



Again, an interview on Skype, this time a girl. We talked pleasantly, I decided everything and answered correctly.



She immediately said that everything is fine and they will take me to the next stage.



The next stage was in-person. Since I was only considered in the Market, there were only 3 sections of the interview, I assigned them to 1 day. The most difficult thing was writing the code in pencil on a piece of paper. I haven’t written by hand for so long that my finger got sick. But I remembered the main js functions and algorithms, so I easily wrote a walk around the binary tree and flatten the multidimensional nested structure.



The third section asked about application architecture, speed optimization, indexes, databases, component organization.



Interview with a supervisor



HR called again and said that I had passed the second stage. I was interested in 1 team, ahead of the interview with the leader. She asked what salary I want. I named the amount from which I repelled. They took me to her a year ago and this year she did not grow up although I learned a lot of new things.



I didn’t really know the situation on the market, but I assumed that I was worth more. HR was delighted with my amount and said that she would inform about the interview with the future leader. Everything went smoothly with the leader; he was a friendly person.



Beginning of work



I was given a poppy and a monitor. Yandex has a cool office, they pay lunch, there is free parking, afternoon tea, coffee, tea, cookies, fruits, sweets. Also nearby are a bunch of cafes and Starbucks, where you can also pay with a card with a limit on food. 9900 rubles for food are issued per month.



blured



There are ottomans and hammocks on the roof. In summer it’s just a paradise, you can go to the open area, fall on a sofa with a macbook and work.



IMG-20190729-114431



I was put to support the Bringly mobile app. The stack is simple and straightforward: React Native. There are codreviews, scrum, daily rallies.



Bells



But not everything is so rosy. Before I had time to work out a month, as Sber announced the termination of funding for Bringly, the project turned out to be unprofitable.



The managers began to panic. Phrases are heard at the mitap: There are no tasks , I'm going to quit. I sat and continued to do the tasks assigned to me, as if what was happening did not concern me. This was the first bell.



At one of the meetings, the manager turned to me: But our new developer, tell me what you are working on. I described the tasks in detail. And the manager replied: Since there are tasks, this is good, so there is a salary.



I was a little dumbfounded by this phrase, because I am a developer and my job is to write code, and what they have there with organization, business and financing was not on my list of tasks. It sounded like they could have been stripped of my salary in the absence of tasks.



The wild party of overpromise and underdelivery



Then we gathered in a large conference room to talk about the future path and development. I was happy because I love conferences. I felt a part of the company. There was a feeling that every programmer is needed, they want to communicate with him, to know his opinion, to keep abreast.



But on the topic of the meeting, you can see the second bell, which I continued to naively ignore:

The wild party of overpromise and underdelivery
IMG-20190729-130144



We were told that Bringly does not bring profit. The presenter also recalled that managers have options that reach their salaries to market ones.

Then there was a meeting with Maxim Grishakov, who also announced the closure of Bringly. And added:

No one will be fired. If you hear such statements - do not believe it.
A bell sounded above my head. If the authorities say that they will not fire anyone, then they will definitely be laid off. And the weak links will fly first, i.e. newbies not sophisticated in corporate games like me.



After the meeting, the leader called me for a conversation. He looked excited and angry, said that I was always in touch in the messenger. He announced that the head of another team would talk to me. This does not mean dismissal.



Then he asked if I was looking for work. And then I realized that they gently hinted at my dismissal on my own . Also, on the way to the canteen, one of the colleagues said that he began to go for interviews ... in the same Sberbank.



Hints, hints ...



Hints - a distinctive feature of Y. Market, possibly the whole Yandex. No one says anything openly, but they hint a lot. And if you do not recognize the hints in time, then you will have a hard time. Then I was invited for an interview by the head of Beru. He was rather arrogant, I didn’t like his way of communicating, and I hoped that he would carry me and not take me to Beru, but leave him in the current team to integrate Bringley into Beru.



But a week later they transferred me and then the fun began. I got into a team with a 20-year-old fresh graduate who wrote a thesis on React + Typescript. He also spoke quite arrogantly, sometimes throwing harsh phrases to my harmless questions that I asked to maintain a smalltalk. We were given a mentor. He wrote on React a long time ago (I worked with Vue). The mentor turned out to be quite toxic, did not accept a different opinion. Taunted me about my IDE, Volozh’s ignorance and the fact that I didn’t work with React.



Dismissal



The situation was aggravated by the fact that the project used a whole ecosystem of Yandex-recorded ones. The pictures were laid out in a separate package, the manual of which was written as if by a schoolboy from Lurka:





The project had a mix of React with apiary (internal framework) and Flow. I said I didn't work with him in Bringley. The mentor grimaced and pointedly said: If you have to mentor like that ...



Plus, at the same time, Yandex scored a bunch of interns through Bootcamp. Then the manager bent me not to do a test, but immediately gave the combat task to autotests, to append to another developer who persistently ignored me. I could not cope with it and transferred to that developer. For this, they gave me a runaway, they said that I should not go into managerial tasks. That no one is obliged to explain anything to me about internal libs, because I'm not an intern, but a full-fledged developer. In general, I have to run around the developers myself and get to the bottom of them. The mentor was not shy about swearing.



The 20-year-old PM boy was reporting me, it was clear that he himself was uncomfortable reporting the person 10 years older. I realized that I did not need Y. Market in my services, key people were negatively disposed towards me and left.



findings



It’s good to go to Yandex in five cases:



  1. You are a fresh graduate of a metropolitan top university with no work experience and go on an internship where a mentor will teach everything
  2. You are the provincial that Yandex transports to Moscow
  3. You are doing very niche things ala ML, math, research, jobs that are hard to find even in Moscow
  4. You are satisfied with the acquaintance
  5. You did not achieve anything in development, but you really want to prove yourself by writing a clone of a popular lib or in a performance on YaTalks


In other cases, if you are an experienced developer with certain monetary requests, who wants to work in a friendly team with transparent processes, then you are not there.



PS: After the dismissal, my resume was in great demand and I was hired 2 times higher.



Update:



If anyone is interested in how to prepare for a social security account on Yandex (and not only) on a JS developer and get on a junior developer, then here is an example list:



What to read:



learn.javascript.ru

developer.mozilla.org

maxpfrontend.ru/vebinary/voprosy-dlya-sobesedovaniya-javascript-razrabotchika



What to know:





All this with examples in the code so that there is an understanding.


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