Hi all! In this post, I want to tell you about my summer internship at ABBYY. I will try to highlight all the points that are usually of interest to students and novice developers when choosing a company. I hope that this post will help someone decide on plans for next summer. In general, let's go!

First, let me tell you a little about myself. My name is Zhenya, at the time of applying for an internship, I was finishing my 3rd year at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Faculty of Innovation and High Technologies (now it may be known as the Phystech School of Applied Mathematics and Informatics). I wanted to choose a company where you can get experience in the field of computer vision: pictures, neural networks, and that's it. Actually, I made the right choice - ABBYY is really great for this, but more on that later.

Selection for an internship

Now it's hard for me to remember what specifically influenced my decision to apply to ABBYY. Perhaps it was the Career Day, which was held at our institute, or perhaps the feedback from acquaintances who had an internship last year. As in most companies, the selection consisted of several stages. When applying through the website, the first step is to screen your resume and complete a machine learning quiz that tests your basic skills in working with data and training models. The emphasis on submission through the site is not accidental - for students of ABBYY departments (Department of Image Recognition and Text Processing and Department of Computational Linguistics at MIPT) there is a simplified selection scheme, so students of the department automatically passed to the second stage.

By the way, about the second stage. It consists of an interview with HR, where they ask about your experience and plans for the future. And, of course, math and programming problems. After that, I had a technical interview with the leaders of the teams to which I applied. At the interview, they again talked about my experience, asked the theory of deep learning, in particular, they talked a lot about convolutional neural networks, which is not surprising, because. I wanted to do Computer Vision. At the end of the interview, I was told in more detail about the tasks that are proposed to be dealt with in the internship.

My job for the internship

During my summer internship, I was involved in applying Neural Architecture Search methods to existing neural network models in the company. In short, I needed to write a program that allows you to choose the optimal architecture for a neural network. To be honest, this task did not seem easy to me. This, in my opinion, is cool, because during the internship period, my colleague and I improved our development skills on Keras and Tensorflow quite well. In addition, Neural Architecture Search methods are at the forefront of deep learning, so I had the opportunity to become familiar with state of the art approaches. It's nice to understand that you use really modern things in your work. It is worth considering that this may not be suitable for everyone - if you have little experience in using neural network models, then even if you have the necessary mathematical apparatus, it will be difficult for an internship. Working effectively with articles requires well-developed skills to navigate the relevant development tools.

Collective

It was super comfortable to work in a team, many employees really walk around the office in slippers! It seemed to me that among the interns there were mostly guys from the Higher School of Economics and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, so a lot of my friends were doing the training at the same time as me. They organized meetings for us, at which company employees talked about their career path at ABBYY: how they started and what tasks they are currently doing. And, of course, there were tours of the office.

I also really liked the work schedule at ABBYY – there is none! You yourself can choose what time to come to work and what time to leave it - this is super convenient, especially for students, but for me personally it has become a small problem, since in the summer there is too much temptation to sleep longer and come to work later. Accordingly, it was often necessary to stay late in order to have time to complete the scheduled tasks. I note that I have never had problems with taking time off or working remotely on any given day. The main thing is not to forget to show the result of your work to your mentor, who throughout the entire internship helps you decide in which direction to move on.

At ABBYY, everyone communicates with each other on "you", you can safely share ideas with your boss and not be afraid to be misunderstood. By the way, during the internship period, the company celebrated its 30th anniversary at the ABBYY Day event, to which interns were also invited. Unfortunately, I was not able to attend it in person, but my colleague gave me a little photo greetings.

Office and life

The ABBYY office is located near the Otradnoye metro station, in the north of Moscow. If you are a student of the Physics and Technology Institute, then it is more convenient to get from Novodachnaya to Degunino station, which, by the way, has no turnstiles. True, with this route you will have a 25-30 minute walk, so if you are not a fan of walking a lot, it is still better to take the metro.

There are several canteens on the territory of the business center, there are vending machines on each floor, including those with hot food. On average, a hearty lunch comes out in the amount of 250-300 rubles. A distinctive feature of ABBYY for me was a large number of free fruits for employees. The company as a whole drowns for a healthy lifestyle and the environment - that's cool! On the 5th floor, you can immediately return batteries, paper, cardboard, bottle caps, energy-saving lamps and broken appliances.

The office has a gym where you can spend time after work. I also really want to note the chill area - the summer veranda, where you can work, lying on a soft ottoman under the sun. Well, or discuss the latest news with colleagues.

I’ll tell you a little more about the salary of interns, because. I'm sure a lot of people are interested too. Internships at ABBYY pay more than the average for interns at other major companies. But, of course, salary should not be the only criterion when choosing a company.

In general, the main idea that I want to share is that if you understand that you want to start building a career in the field of deep learning, then be sure to try to apply for an internship at ABBYY. Good luck!

Source: habr.com