Senior Software Engineer • Former Employee
Pros: Great office facilities: food, cookies, coffee, tea, fruits, gym.
Powerful hardware: MacPro laptops, Desktops.
Discounts in all cafes nearby.
Competitive salary.
Great place to start a career or to continue with a few years of experience.
I believe Yandex is a significant step forward from a common Russian software company.
Cons: - Cons:
- Management doesn't understand (or can't explain) why we do something. It's really difficult to get solid targets or directions for development.
- Management believes all developers have near-to-the-same area of expertise. Thus, tasks may be reassigned by management to different owners without any discussion.
- If a member of your team is overloaded, you would definitely get a part of their tasks, in spite of really different specialization between them and you.
- A typical Yandex employee is a person with a few years of C/C++, surely with ACM experience. These people know 'how' to do whatever they want, but don't know what is really 'worth' doing. For example: plenty of projects have their own implementation of string (exactly, zero-copy!).
- In spite of Yandex trying to be a western IT company, in fact, it's a Russian company. This means 'special features' of Russian management style: management doesn't discuss with employees mission and vision, targets and goals. So, it's not really a western-style company at all. Moreover, from my point of view, management isn't really open-minded and willing to hear.
- Employees don't fully understand what they do (I mean not their particular area of work, but a bird's-eye overview), why business gives money for development (and what business expects from development), and finally, the most important, what we desire to achieve (particular technical goals).
- The company nudges employees to develop their own 'solutions' for work in their private time.
- Management doesn't have strong business acumen.
- New managers don't know what it means to be a manager, not a supervisor.
- Yandex culture exists only on paper.
- Conclusion:
- I believe Yandex is a good place to work only for young people with a few years of professional experience and, necessarily, ACM experience. I'm not sure Yandex is a good place to work for people with any 'special' skills.