In the summer, 26 trainees joined our team - students at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, HSE and other universities. They came for a two-month (July-August) paid internship. In the fall, many continued collaborating with ABBYY as part-time internships, and several people moved to permanent positions. Interns are involved in tasks in R&D departments. We already did a mini interview with the guys in Stories on our Instagram, and not so long ago there was a post on Habré from our intern Zhenya - about his practice in ABBYY.
And now we asked three students to share their impressions of the internship at ABBYY. What experience and knowledge have they already gained in the company? How to combine study and work and not burn out? Okay, Zoomers, now we’ll tell you everything.
ABBYY : Why did you choose ABBYY this summer?
Egor : We came to the faculty to talk about internships, there were representatives from ABBYY. I also went to a career fair, and I was also invited to this company - I just needed a C # developer. Now I am doing this.
Anya : When we were shown presentations on internships for the summer at the FKK, the most memorable ABBYY presentation was that it directly sunk into my soul.
About your path in IT
ABBYY : It seems that now everyone wants to get into IT. Why did you initially go to study in this particular field?
Egor : It turned out funny. I did not enter Fizteh. I studied at the Lyceum at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, in the physics and mathematics class, clicked all the puzzles at the olympiads. And in the year of my graduation, all the Olympiads changed dramatically, and I did not become the winner of the FizTech Olympiad - only a prize-winner. Therefore, I could not enter FizTech without exams. But I accidentally found out that they were taking me to HSE. To the best computer department! That is, I wanted to go to Fizteh, to FRTK (Faculty of Radio Engineering and Cybernetics), but then they told me: "You go to programming anyway." I was happy.
ABBYY : Lesha, do you study at MIPT at our department of image recognition and text processing? What do you think?
Alex : Great. I like.
ABBYY : Does it help you combine study with work?
Alex : Of course, couples are held here in the office of ABBYY, and this time counts as working hours.
Egor : Now I’m even envious. But not that much. At Fiztekh, the system is too academic for me. It would be too difficult for me there - I'm talking about all sorts of required subjects, such as sopromat. For example, there are no physics at the FCN in HSE.
About work, study and time management
ABBYY : How do you manage to combine work with study?
Egor : I quite calmly combine it. I chose employment for myself, I work three days a week. Another udalenka saves: sometimes I can work at a lecture.
Anya : I work 20 hours a week. They said it would take a month or two, and I’ll decide how much I want to work.
Alex : I work 32 hours a week. I myself chose the number of hours, and, if necessary, I can change.
ABBYY : Do you have any schedule when you come to the office?
Alex : There is an electric train at 9:21, starting from Novodachnaya. I live there, so I am attached to electric trains [ Lesha lives and studies in Dolgoprudny ].
Egor : I’ll come back later, trains from 9:20 to 10:20 are suitable for me. Which I wake up to. It was severe in the summer. He worked 8 hours a day and tried to arrive at 10: 30-11: 00 and work until 19:00. And now every week is different.
Anya : I ride the subway. But my schedule also depends on the pairs.
ABBYY : Lesha and Yegor, we know that you have already switched from an intern to a permanent position. How do you like it?
Alex : So far, fine. I will not say that it became easier after a summer internship. When my studies began, I immediately felt it.
Egor : On the contrary, it became easier for me. In the summer there was full employment, and then there was free time for study and everything else. I don’t go to all lectures: at seminars in 15 minutes they can tell a squeeze, and then solve problems on the topic.
ABBYY : What can you advise students who want to combine study with work, but do not know how?
Egor : Prioritize.
Alex : The main thing is to be able to relax.
Egor : To process - in no case: it is impossible to burn out. It is important to control your time. Time management decides.
Alex : “Do not bother,” this is what we call it.
Anya : We must plan ahead. Usually you understand what your deadlines are for studying and what you need to do at work in a week.
About new knowledge and skills
ABBYY : Do you feel that you have grown during the summer internship, learned something?
Egor : Of course. It’s not that I changed my direction of activity, but when I walked here, I thought that I would deal with the backend, and not with sites and web applications. For a month in ABBYY I became a full-stack developer - my boss told me so in a joke. I learned JavaScript, wrote an application in JS, tested it and made it more user friendly. I learned the server part on ASP.NET from this testing. Now I am doing both the server and client parts, and I am a full-stack developer, it turns out. I am glad that I changed my views, and realized that I was interested.
Anya : I am self-taught, and I have never had structured knowledge in the field in which I work. I wrote one project and thought I knew Android. But she came to ABBYY and gained a lot of knowledge in terms of application architecture, production and GIT. I feel that I now understand this.
ABBYY : Do you want to further develop in this area?
Anya : I would like to try myself somewhere else. This is my first internship, and I do not know what is next. It takes more time to understand whether this is mine.
Alex : In ABBYY, I realized that I was interested. The range of areas where you can develop is large. Before that, I had experience with machine learning, but I wanted to try the backend and Cloud. At the internship, I decided that I was ready to do this for a long time.
Egor : I have the same situation. In the next two years, I will probably be testing.
ABBYY : Lesha, does the knowledge you get at the ABBYY department help you?
Alex : Yes, of course. The program of the department is always changing: there is more practice. I think this is useful.
ABBYY : Do you often work in a team or on your own? What do you like more?
Anya : When I went for an internship at ABBYY Mobile, I realized that I would develop as a team, and I wanted it. Three months have passed, and rather, I just want to sit and skip. Psychologically, on the contrary, it’s easier for someone to work in a team. I can do this and that, but sometimes I want to work alone.
Egor : We have a team of only two people, we are all trainees. Each has its own conveyor of tasks, that is, each is engaged in its own part. We do not actively interact with anyone, but we have allocated a separate team lead for us.
Alex : My intern task was a little detached from the general process. I studied it alone, sat and understood. I like this mode more. If several people are engaged in the same task and everyone does the same thing, it demotivates me. Now we have a team of eight people. There are standups.
About complex and interesting tasks
ABBYY : Is the result of your work already used in ABBYY products or solutions?
Egor : Yes, I like it the most. My application, which I created during the internship, is actively used. It reports on tests, and other departments are already interested in it. Now they decided that it will be the main one, we have allocated a department for this - FlexiCapture Automation. My colleague and I are engaged in automatic testing, there are other developers in our team, but they are working on other tasks. More tests allow me to feel the internationality of the company when I run invoices from different countries through the system.
Alex : I have a similar situation. It is nice to realize that the work was not idle. I wrote an application for storing and processing logs in ABBYY FineReader. There was also a task on microservices. The plans are to collect all these services in the cloud so that they are stored in the same system and interact with each other. I just conducted an experiment on how convenient it is to trace requests in this system, wrote an article for the ABBYY internal knowledge base, told what I did and what problems I encountered. In the future, this article will be useful to other employees.
Anya : I don’t have anything ready yet. In one release, I hope that what I do will go into production, and people will feel and try.
ABBYY Team Features
ABBYY : Who would you recommend an internship in your department?
Anya : Those who know how to work in a team and adequately perceive their schools.
Alex : And take this philosophically.
Egor : Well, yes, about the same farewell. I think this can be attributed to all IT. You must be able to communicate and explain what you are doing.
Alex : And listen.
ABBYY : And who, in your opinion, is ABBYY corporate culture suitable for?
Egor : For students - perfect.
Alex: To FIVT students especially [ FIVT - Faculty of Innovation and High Technology MIPT ].
Egor : When the head of our department asked on what conditions we want to stay in the company, he told how he used to work in another place, and there one student went to the academy for the sake of work. He advised us in no case not to drop out of school, so we work on a flexible schedule.
Egor : Here, the students are maximally met. Not sure where a lot of the same. And work at ABBYY will suit a purposeful, calm, able to communicate, listen, understand and explain.
About free time
ABBYY : What do you do in your free time from internships and studies, if of course you still have it?
Anya : Recently I started playing sports, going to the gym. Even at the university, she became an assistant teacher in four different subjects.
Alex : I'm running. At the weekend I go to Moscow to hang out, repair.
Egor : I’m taking a walk. Basically, of course, I spend time with a girl, I go to bars.
ABBYY : Follow some media or influencers in IT?
Alex : "A typical programmer."
Egor : I watched the YouTube channel via JavaScript and the frontend, which is led by Yevgeny Kovalchuk.
About the future of IT
ABBYY : How do you see the future of technology in 10 years, and how can our life change?
Egor : It is impossible to predict, because everything flies at an unrealistic speed. But I'm still waiting for quantum computers to come out. With their release, much will change, but how exactly - no one knows.
Alex : I also thought about quantum computers. They will be faster than usual millions, if not billions of times.
Egor : In theory, with the mass output of quantum computers, all encryption and hashing will fly, because they can pick it up.
Alex : I'll have to redo everything. I heard that if a quantum computer learns to crack them, then right there on quantum computers it will be possible to come up with a new hash.
Anya : And I think that almost all of our lives will go to mobile devices. It seems to me that soon there will be no plastic cards - neither credit, nor any other.
Egor : In terms of software development, everything is slowly completely flowing into the Internet. It seems to me that with the growth of Internet speed everything will turn into clouds.
Alex : In short, Cloud is a normal topic.
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