To start, I’ll tell you a little about myself. My name is Zhenya, at the time of applying for the internship I was finishing the 3rd year of MIPT, Faculty of Innovation and High Technology (now it may be known as the PhysTech School of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science). I wanted to choose a company where you can get experience in the field of computer vision: pictures, neural networks, and that’s all. Actually, I made the right choice - ABBYY really works great for this, but more on that later.
Selection for an internship
Now it’s hard for me to remember what specifically influenced my decision to apply for ABBYY. Perhaps it was a career day that was held at our institute, or maybe the reviews of acquaintances who had an internship last year. As in most companies, the selection consisted of several stages. When submitting through the site, the first step is screening a resume and completing a machine learning test task that tests basic skills in working with data and teaching models. The emphasis on submitting through the site is not accidental - for students of the ABBYY departments (the Department of Image Recognition and Text Processing and the Department of Computer Linguistics at MIPT) there is a simplified selection scheme, so the students of the department automatically passed to the second stage.
By the way, about the second stage. It consists in interviewing HR, asking about your experience and future plans. And, of course, math and programming problems. After that, I was expected to have a technical interview with the leaders of the teams to which I applied. At the interview, they again talked about my experience, asked the theory of deep learning, in particular, they talked a lot about convolutional neural networks, which is not surprising, because I wanted to do Computer Vision. At the end of the interview, they told me more about the tasks that are offered to be done at the internship.
My internship task
During the summer internship, I was engaged in applying the Neural Architecture Search methods to the neural network models already available in the company. In short, I needed to write a program that allows me to choose the optimal architecture for a neural network. Frankly, this task did not seem simple to me. This, in my opinion, is cool, because during the internship period, my colleague and I had a good level of development skills at Keras and Tensorflow. In addition, Neural Architecture Search methods are an advanced field in the field of deep learning, so I
Collective
Work in the team was super comfortable, many employees really walk around the office in slippers! It seemed to me that among the interns there were mainly guys from the Higher School of Economics and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, therefore, many of my friends interned with me at the same time. We organized meetings at which company employees talked about their career paths at ABBYY: where they started and what tasks they are currently working on. Well, of course, there were tours of the office.
I also really liked the work schedule at ABBYY - it is not there! You yourself can choose how much to come to work and how much to leave it - it is super convenient, especially for students, but for me personally this has become a small problem, since in the summer the temptation is too great to sleep and come to work later. Accordingly, often it was necessary to stay until late in order to complete the planned tasks. I note that I never had any problems with taking time off or working remotely on some day. The main thing is not to forget to show the result of your work to your mentor, who throughout the internship helps to decide in which direction to move on.
In ABBYY everyone communicates with each other on “you”, you can safely share ideas with your boss and not be afraid to be misunderstood. By the way, during the internship, the company celebrated its 30th anniversary at the ABBYY Day event, to which interns were also invited. Unfortunately, I was not able to attend it personally, but my colleague gave me a little hello.
Office and life
The ABBYY office is located near the Otradnoye metro station, in the north of Moscow. If you are a student of PhysTech, it is more convenient to get from Novodachnaya to the Degunino station, which, by the way, has no turnstiles. However, on this route you will be expected to walk in the length of 25-30 minutes, so if you are not a fan of walking a lot, it is still better to get on the subway.
On the territory of the business center there are several dining rooms, on each floor there are vending machines, including hot food. On average, a hearty meal comes out in the amount of 250-300 rubles. A distinctive feature of ABBYY for me was a large number of free fruits for employees. The company as a whole drowns for healthy lifestyle and ecology - it's cool! On the 5th floor, you can immediately hand over batteries, paper, cardboard, bottle caps, energy-saving lamps and broken appliances.
The office has a gym where you can spend time after work. I also really want to note
I’ll tell you a little more about the salaries of interns, as I am sure that many are also interested. On an internship at ABBYY they pay more than the average for interns at other large companies. But, of course, salary should not be the only criterion when choosing a company.
In general, the main idea that I want to share: if you understand that you want to start building a career in deep learning, then be sure to try applying for an internship at ABBYY. Good luck