Alexander Baranov works at Veeam as an R&D director and lives between the two countries. He spends half of his time in Prague, the other half in St. Petersburg. These cities are home to the largest Veeam development offices.
In 2006, it was a start-up by two entrepreneurs from Russia, associated with software for backing up virtual machines (from there the name V[ee][a]M, a virtual machine, also came from). Today it is a giant corporation with more than four thousand employees around the world.
Alexander told us what it is like to work in such a company and how difficult it is to get into it. Below is his monologue.
Traditionally, we will talk about the assessment of the company on My Circle: Veeam Software received from its employees . He is appreciated for a good social package, a comfortable working atmosphere in the team, for interesting tasks and for the fact that the company makes the world a better place.
What products does Veeam develop
Products that provide fault tolerance for IT infrastructure. Fortunately, over time, the hardware has become quite reliable, and the clouds provide fault tolerance. But human error persists to this day.
For example, the classic problem of incompatibility of updates with the organization's infrastructure. The administrator rolled out an unverified update, or it happened automatically, and because of this, the operation of the enterprise servers was disrupted. Another example: someone has made changes to a shared project or set of documents that they feel is appropriate. Later, a problem was discovered, and it was necessary to return the state of a week ago. Sometimes such changes are not even associated with conscious human actions: relatively recently, cryptolocker viruses have gained popularity. A user brings a flash drive with dubious content to a work computer or visits a site with cats, and as a result, computers on the network become infected.
In a situation where the bad has already happened, we give the opportunity to roll back the changes. If the changes are only planned, we allow you to check their impact in an isolated infrastructure, recreated from a data center backup.
Oftentimes, backups act as a "silent witness" to an organization's audits. Public companies need to comply with external regulators (such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act), and for good reason. In 2008, the state of the world economy was shaken due to the fact that some participants in the financial market, roughly speaking, falsified the results of their activities. This snowballed and the economy sank. Since then, regulators have been monitoring the processes in public companies more closely. The ability to restore the state of the IT infrastructure, mail system, document management system for reporting periods is one of the auditors' requirements.
Microsoft, Amazon, Google and other cloud providers have native solutions that back up resources inside the cloud. But their decisions are "things in themselves." The problem is that large companies in most cases have a hybrid IT infrastructure: part of it is in the cloud, part is on the ground. The cloud usually hosts web projects and customer-facing applications. Applications and servers that store sensitive information or personal data are most often found on the ground.
In addition, organizations use several different clouds to build one hybrid one to minimize risks. When a multinational company has built a hybrid cloud, it needs a single and common fault tolerance system for the entire infrastructure.
How difficult is it to develop such products
New technologies are constantly emerging that require study, adaptation and experience. When we first appeared and were a startup, few people considered virtualization seriously. There were applications for backing up physical data centers. Virtualized data centers were viewed as toys.
We started supporting virtualization-aware backup from the very beginning, when the technology was only used by enthusiasts. And then there was its explosive growth and recognition as the standard. Now we see other areas that are waiting for the same qualitative leap, and we are trying to be on the wave. The ability to keep your nose downwind is sewn somewhere in the DNA of the company.
Now the company has already gone through the days of a startup. Now, for many large customers, stability and reliability are important, and making a decision on fault tolerance can take several years. There is adaptation, verification of products, compliance with numerous requirements. It turns out a funny situation - on the one hand, you need to ensure the reliability and confidence in the products, and on the other hand, to remain modern.
But the new is always associated with a certain level of ignorance of technology, the market, or both.
For example, after several years of work, we realized that we need to use the built-in storage capabilities of data storage systems to speed up backups. This is how a whole direction of integration with iron manufacturers was born. To date, Veeam partners in this program are all the largest players in this market - HP, NetApp, Dell EMC, Fujitsu, etc.
We also thought that virtualization would replace classic servers. But life has shown that the last 10% of physical servers remain, virtualizing which is either not possible or does not make sense. And they also need to be backed up. This is how Veeam Agent for Windows/Linux appeared.
At one time, we thought that it was time for Unix to take its place in the museum, and refused to support it. But as soon as we went to clients with a long history, we realized that Unix is more alive than all living things. And yet they wrote a decision for him.
The same story was with tape drives. We thought: “who needs them in the modern world?” Then we worked on such features as granular data recovery or incremental backup with a synthetic full copy - and this simply cannot be done on tape, you need a disk. Then it turned out that tape drives work as one of the means to provide immutable backups that are needed for long-term storage - so that after 5 years to come, take a tape from the shelf and do an audit. Well, and the size of clients - we started with small ones - and no one uses tapes there. And then we grew to customers who told us that they would not buy a product without ribbons.
What technologies are used in Veeam
For tasks related to business logic, we use .NET. We started with it, and continue to optimize. Now we use .NET Core in a number of solutions. When the startup first formed, there were several supporters of this stack in the team. It is good in terms of writing business logic, development speed and convenience of tools. Then it was not the most popular decision, but now it is clear that those supporters were right.
At the same time, we write under Unix, Linux, work with hardware, this requires the use of other solutions. System parts related to information about the data that we store in the backup, data search algorithms, algorithms related to the operation of hardware - all this is written in C ++.
How employees are distributed around the world
Now the company employs about four thousand people. About a thousand of them are in Russia. The company has two large groups. The first deals with the development and technical support of products. The second makes products visible to the outside world: sales and marketing are in its remit. The ratio between groups is approximately thirty to seventy.
We have about thirty offices around the world. Sales are more widely distributed, but development is also not lagging behind. Some products are being worked on simultaneously in several offices - partly in St. Petersburg, partly in Prague. Some are developed in only one, for example, a product that provides a physical backup of Linux is developed in Prague. There is a product that is only being worked on in Canada.
We do distributed development to meet customer requirements. Large customers feel more secure when the development is located in the same region where the product works.
We already have a very large office in the Czech Republic, and next year we plan to open another one in Prague - for 500 developers and testers. Those who moved to the capital of the Czech Republic in the “first wave” are happy to share their experience and life hacks with everyone who is interested in the opportunity to work in Europe on Habré. In Russia, the office is located in St. Petersburg, part of the internal projects are carried out in Izhevsk, and support is partly in Moscow. In general, several hundred people around the world are engaged in technical support. There are specialists of different levels of technical training and specialization. The highest level are people who are able to understand the product at the source code level, and they work in the same office as the development.
How processes are structured
About once a year we have major releases with new functionality, and every two to three months we have updates with bug fixes and improvements that meet urgent market requirements or platform changes. Requirements are assigned priorities - from minor to critical, without which a release is impossible. The latter are called "epics".
There is a classic triangle - quality, quantity of resources, timing (in the common people, “quickly, efficiently, inexpensively, choose two”). We cannot do bad things, the quality must always be high. Resources are also limited, even though we are trying to expand all the time. Much more flexibility in time management, but it is often fixed. Therefore, the only thing that we can vary is the amount of functionality in the release.
Epics, as a rule, try to keep no more than 30-40% of the projected release cycle. The rest we can cut off, transfer, refine, modify. This is our room for maneuver.
A temporary team is created for each requirement in the release. It can be three people, and fifty, depending on the complexity. We adhere to a flexible development methodology, once a week we organize reviews and discussions of the completed and upcoming work on each functionality.
Half of the time of the release cycle is spent on development, half on finishing the product. But we have a saying - "the technical debt of a bankrupt project is zero." Therefore, it is more important to make a product that works and is in demand than endlessly licking the code. If the product is popular, then it is already worth developing it further and adapting it to future changes.
How Veeam is hiring developers
The selection algorithm is multistage. The first level is a conversation between the candidate and the recruiter about the wishes of the person himself. At this stage, we are trying to understand if we are a good fit for the candidate. It is important for us that we are interesting as a company, because bringing a person into a project is an expensive pleasure.
If there is interest, then at the second level we offer a test task to understand how relevant the candidate's experience is and what he can demonstrate as a specialist. For example, we ask you to make a file compressor. This is a standard task, and it shows how a person relates to the code, what culture and style he adheres to, what solutions he uses.
On a test task, everything is usually perfectly visible. A person who has just become literate and has written a letter for the first time is noticeably different from a person who writes letters all the time.
Next, we have an interview. Usually it is carried out by three team leaders at once, so that everything is as objective as possible. In addition, it helps to recruit technically compatible people who have roughly the same methods and approaches to development, even if they end up working on different teams.
During the week, we conduct several interviews for an open vacancy and decide who we will continue to work with.
Often the guys come to us and say that they are looking for a job, because they have nowhere to move in the current one - you can only wait for a promotion along with the retirement of the boss. We have a slightly different dynamic. Twelve years ago, Veeam was a startup with ten employees. Now it is a company with several thousand employees.
People get here like in a turbulent river. New directions are constantly appearing, yesterday's ordinary developers become team leads. People are growing technically, growing administratively. If you are developing a small feature, but want to develop it, then half the battle is already done. Support will be at all levels, from the team leader to the owners of the company. You don’t know how to do something administratively - there are courses, internal trainers, experienced colleagues. There is not enough development experience - there is a Veeam Academy project. So we are open to everyone, both professionals and beginners.
The Veeam Academy project is an evening free offline C# intensive for beginner programmers with the prospect of employment at Veeam Software for the best students. The goal of the project is to bridge the gap between the amount of knowledge and practical skills of the average university graduate and the amount of knowledge required to interest a good employer. For three months, the guys study the principles of OOP in practice, immerse themselves in the features of C # and study the engine compartment of .Net. In addition to lectures, tests, laboratory and personal projects, the guys develop their joint project according to all the rules of real companies. The topic of the project is unknown in advance - it is chosen together with everyone in the first days after the start of the course. On the last stream, she became the Virtual Bank.
Enrollment is now open .
Source: habr.com