Compare yandex and mail as a place of work: student experience

Synopsis

Now I am going through an interview at Tarantool in Mail.ru and the day before I had a conversation with a friend about this.

He supported my zeal and wished me success, but noted that it would be much more interesting and promising to work at Yandex. When I asked why, a friend told me about the general impression that he had in the process of interacting with the products of these companies.

It is worth mentioning that we are both students of the Moscow State Technical University named after N. E. Bauman, third-year students who do not conduct a deep analysis of serious issues, but simply exchange opinions.

So, my friend noticed that, on the one hand, we have a nice-looking Yandex, with flexible search and a bunch of useful products that the company is developing, like Taxi, Drive, and the like, and also that it uses the convenient Yandex Browser, which, although written on Chromium, has a ton of useful features on top. On the other hand, Mile Ugly mail, few opportunities, there is not such an abundance of projects as Yandex and, of course, the Amigo browser with Mail.ru Agent, which are installed on your PC with any pirated software from the Internet (here he obviously forgot about Yandex.Bar).

What happened next

It was difficult to argue with his arguments, but I fundamentally disagreed with the conclusions that my friend made. Then we decided to seriously discuss all the pros and cons, based primarily on personal experience.

I started with the fact that if Mail does not use the name of the company in the name of its units, as Yandex does (Yandex.Food, Yandex.Taxi, etc.), then this does not mean at all that they do not have similar projects (Delivery Club, Citymobil, etc.). Moreover, I noticed that the latter, compared with Yandex, has even more large projects that are connected with Mile only by location. Among them are social networks such as VKontakte, Odnoklassniki and Moi Mir.

The key point in our dispute was educational programs companies. This did not apply to online courses, we discussed only face-to-face classes.

Yandex's calling card is School of Data Analysis. There, students and graduates of engineering universities are taught in four areas - Data Science, BigData, Machine Learning and Data Analysis in Applied Sciences (whatever that means). And the backbone of Mile's educational program is formed by Technoprojects - semester and two-year courses that teach students on the basis of leading technical universities in Moscow and St. Petersburg - MSTU, MIPT, MEPhI, Moscow State University и Petersburg Polytechnic University. Both, I think, need no introduction.

The range of Mail's specialties is much wider than in Yandex, but in terms of the level of training, we decided to leave Mail and Yandex on the same level.

Educational programs are free and available after passing entrance tests. Why are companies doing this? To popularize the IT-sphere in the Russian Federation, perhaps. But, I’ll say for sure, one of the main goals is to recruit interns.

Compare offices

Maybe my natural interest played, or maybe there was simply nothing to do, but I visited the offices of both companies more than once.

First, I got to Mail.ru, which is located near the Aeroport metro station. There they just talked about the educational program, led excursions. I will not go into details. And Yandex was at open lectures on working with data in the company. There was also a job fair for students and graduates who wanted to try their hand at IT.

And what will I say? Both here and there the information was presented in an accessible and interesting way, but in Yandex, after all, the speakers did a little better. Otherwise, I prefer mail.ru. Why? Let's start with the fact that tours of the offices in Mail were conducted by people who have been in the company for several years, occupy high positions and in the process answered many questions that were of interest to me then. The girls who communicated with us in Yandex were only pleasant and sweet, but only now their work ended with getting us from point A to point B, it was difficult for them to find out something about the company. Here, I think, Mail approached more responsibly. Well, I liked the office of the latter more, somehow everything was done on a grand scale, cordially and more majestically, although this is completely a matter of taste. I was pleased with the fresh bar with fruits and orange juice for visitors, cookies and coffee. While in Yandex, although it was possible to drink hot tea with biscuits, the service was clearly inferior to Mile. A trifle, but nice.

With the result that

Surprisingly, after an hour of reasoning, everyone remained with his own, and I could not convince my friend. Although my other friend, with whom we visited both Yandex and Mail.ru, also reacted with great warmth to the latter. But, to each his own.

And what do you think?

Source: habr.com