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 career or to continue with few years of experience. - I believe Yandex is significant step forward from 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, task may be reassigned by management to different owner without any discussion. - If a member of your team is overloaded, definitely, you would get a part of his tasks, in spite of really different specialization between him and you. - Typical Yandex employee is a person with 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' to do. Example: plenty projects have their own implementation of string (exactly, zero-copy!). - In spite of Yandex tries to be western IT company, in fact, it's Russian company. It means 'special features' of russian management style: management doesn't discuss with employees mission and vision, targets and goals. So, it's not really western-style company at all. Moreover, at 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 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). - 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 does it mean to be a manager, not supervisor. - Yandex culture exists only in paper. - Conclusion - I believe Yandex is good place to work only for young people with few years of professional experience and, necessarily, ACM experience. I'm not sure Yandex is good place to work for people with any 'special' skills.
