Have you already started your journey in IT? Or are you still stuck on your smartphone looking for that very job? An internship will help you take the first career step and figure out what you want to do.
In the summer, 26 interns joined our team - students from MIPT, HSE and other universities. They came for a two-month (July-August) paid internship. In the fall, many continued to collaborate with ABBYY as part-time internships, and several people moved to permanent positions. Interns work on tasks in R&D departments. We have already done a mini-interview with the guys in on our Instagram, and was on Habré not so long ago from our intern Zhenya - about his practice at ABBYY.
And now we asked three students to share their impressions of their internship at ABBYY. What experience and knowledge have they already gained in the company? How to combine study and work and not burn out? Okay, zoomers, now we will tell you everything.
ABBYY: Why did you choose ABBYY this summer?
Egor: They came to our faculty to talk about internships, and there were also representatives from ABBYY. I also went to a career fair, and I was also invited to this company - they just needed a C# developer. Now that's what I do.
Anna: When we were shown presentations on summer internships at the Faculty of Computer Science, the ABBYY presentation was most memorable and sank into my soul.
About your path to IT
ABBYY: It seems that now everyone wants to get into IT. Why did you initially choose to study in this field?
Egor: It turned out funny. I didn't get into Physics and Technology. I studied at the Lyceum at MIPT, in the physics and mathematics class, and solved all the problems at the Olympiads. And in the year of my graduation, all the Olympiads changed dramatically, and I did not become the winner of the Phystech Olympiad - only a medalist. Therefore, I could not enter the Physics and Technology Institute without exams. But I accidentally found out that I was being accepted into the Higher School of Economics. To the best computer department! That is, I wanted to enter the Physics and Technology Institute, the FRTK (Faculty of Radio Engineering and Cybernetics), but then they told me: “You’re already getting into programming.” I was happy.
ABBYY: Lesha, you study at MIPT in our department of image recognition and text processing? What do you think?
Lesha: Great. I like.
ABBYY: Does this help you combine study and work?
Lesha: Of course, classes are held here at the ABBYY office, and this time is counted as working time.
Egor: I’m even envious now. But not that much. At Phystech, the system is too academic for me. It would be too difficult for me - I’m talking about all sorts of compulsory subjects, such as strength of materials. At the Faculty of Computer Science at HSE, for example, there is no physics.
About work, study and time management
ABBYY: How do you manage to combine work and study?
Egor: I combine it quite calmly. I chose to be busy myself; I work three days a week. Remote work also saves me: sometimes I can work during a lecture.
Anna: I work 20 hours a week. They said it would take a month or two and I would decide how much I wanted to work.
Lesha: I work 32 hours a week. I chose the number of hours for myself, and if necessary, I can change it.
ABBYY: Do you have a schedule when you come to the office?
Lesha: There is a train at 9:21, starting from Novodachnaya. I live there, so I’m tied to the trains [Lesha lives and studies in Dolgoprudny].
Egor: I’m arriving later, trains run from 9:20 to 10:20. Which one will I wake up to? It was strict in the summer. I worked 8 hours a day and tried to arrive at 10:30-11:00 and work until 19:00. But now every week it’s different.
Anna: I take the subway. But my schedule also depends on couples.
ABBYY: Lesha and Egor, we know that you have already moved from an intern to a permanent position. How do you like it?
Lesha: Still alright. I won’t say that things got easier after the summer internship. When school started, I immediately felt it.
Egor: On the contrary, I felt better. In the summer it was full time, and then there was free time for study and everything else. I don’t go to all lectures: at seminars they can tell a summary in 15 minutes, and then solve problems on the topic.
ABBYY: What advice can you give to students who want to combine study and work, but don’t know how?
Egor: Prioritize.
Lesha: The main thing is to be able to rest.
Egor: Do not overwork: you cannot burn out. It is important to control your time. Time management is king.
Lesha: “Don’t go too far,” that’s what we call it.
Anna: You have to plan ahead. Usually you understand what deadlines you have at school and what you need to do at work in a week.
About new knowledge and skills
ABBYY: Do you feel that you have grown or learned something during your summer internship?
Egor: Undoubtedly. It’s not that I changed the direction of my activity, but when I came here, I thought that I would work on the backend, and not on websites and web applications. Within a month at ABBYY, I became a full-stack developer - my boss told me so half-jokingly. I learned JavaScript, wrote an application in JS, tested it and made it more user-friendly. Based on this testing, I also learned the server side in ASP.NET. Now I’m doing both the server and client parts, and I’m a full-stack developer, it turns out. I'm glad that I changed my views and realized that I was interested.
Anna: I am self-taught and have never had structured knowledge in the field in which I work. I wrote one project and thought that I knew Android. But I came to ABBYY and gained a lot of knowledge in terms of application architecture, production and GIT. I feel like I understand this now.
ABBYY: Do you want to further develop in this area?
Anna: I would like to try myself somewhere else. This is my first internship, and I don’t know what’s next yet. It still takes time to figure out if it's mine.
Lesha: At ABBYY I realized that I was interested. The range of areas where you can develop is large. Before this, I had experience with machine learning, but I wanted to try the backend and Cloud. During the internship, I decided that I was ready to do this for a long time.
Egor: I have the same situation. In the next two years, I will probably be doing testing.
ABBYY: Lesha, does the knowledge you receive at the ABBYY department help you?
Lesha: Yes, sure. The department's program is always changing: more practice appears. I think this is useful.
ABBYY: Do you work more often in a team or independently? Which one do you like best?
Anna: When I went for an internship at ABBYY Mobile, I understood that I would develop in the team, and I wanted that. Three months have passed, and I would rather just sit and walk away. For some, psychologically, on the contrary, it is easier to work in a team. I can do both, but sometimes I want to work alone.
Egor: We have a team of only two people, we are all trainees. Everyone has their own conveyor of tasks, that is, everyone does their part. We don’t actively interact with anyone, but we have a separate team lead assigned to us.
Lesha: My internship task was a little removed from the overall process. I dealt with it alone, sat and figured it out. I like this mode better. If several people are working on one task and everyone is doing the same thing, it demotivates me. We currently have a team of eight people. There are stand-ups.
About complex and interesting tasks
ABBYY: The result of your work is already used in ABBYY products or solutions?
Egor: Yes, that's what I like best. My app, which I created during my internship, is widely used. It produces reports on tests, and other departments have already become interested in it. Now they decided that it would be the main one, and allocated a department for this - FlexiCapture Automation. My colleague and I do automated testing; there are other developers on our team, but they work on other tasks. Tests also allow me to feel the internationality of the company when I run invoices from different countries through the system.
Lesha: I have a similar situation. It's nice to know that the work was not in vain. I was writing an application for storing and processing logs in ABBYY FineReader. There was also an assignment on microservices. The plan is to collect all these services in the cloud so that they are stored in one system and interact with each other. I was just conducting an experiment on how convenient it is to trace requests in this system, wrote an article for the ABBYY internal knowledge base, told what I did and what problems I encountered. This article will be useful to other employees in the future.
Anna: I don’t have anything ready yet. In one release, I hope that what I’m doing will go into production, and people will touch it and try it.
About the qualities of the ABBYY team
ABBYY: Who would you recommend to intern in your department?
Anna: Those who know how to work in a team and adequately perceive their mistakes.
Lesha: And treat it philosophically.
Egor: Well, yes, about the same parting words. I think this can be applied to all IT. You need to be able to communicate and explain what you do.
Lesha: And listen.
ABBYY: Who do you think would suit ABBYY’s corporate culture?
Egor: Ideal for students.
Lesha: FIVT students especially [FIVT – Faculty of Innovation and High Technologies MIPT].
Egor: When the head of our department asked under what conditions we wanted to stay in the company, he told us how he had previously worked in another place, and there one student went to the academy for the sake of work. He advised us not to give up our studies under any circumstances, so we work on a flexible schedule.
Egor: Here they accommodate students as much as possible. I'm not sure it's the same in many places. And working at ABBYY is suitable for someone who is purposeful, calm, and able to communicate, listen, understand and explain.
About free time
ABBYY: What do you do in your free time from internships and studies, if you still have any, of course?
Anna: I recently started playing sports, going to the gym. While still at university, I became a teaching assistant in four different subjects.
Lesha: I'm running. On weekends I go to Moscow to hang out and relax.
Egor: I'm walking. Mostly, of course, I spend time with my girlfriend and go to bars.
ABBYY: Do you follow any media or influencers in IT?
Lesha: “Typical programmer.”
Egor: I watched the YouTube channel on JavaScript and frontend, run by Evgeniy Kovalchuk.
About the future of IT
ABBYY: Where do you see the future of technology in 10 years, and how might our lives change?
Egor: It’s impossible to predict, because everything flies at unreal speed. But I'm still waiting for quantum computers to come out. With their release, a lot will change, but no one knows exactly how.
Lesha: I also thought about quantum computers. They will be millions, if not billions of times faster than usual.
Egor: In theory, with the massive release of quantum computers, all encryption and hashing will fly away, because they will be able to figure it out.
Lesha: We'll have to redo everything. I heard that if a quantum computer learns to hack them, then a new hashing can be invented on quantum computers.
Anna: And I think that almost all of our lives will turn into mobile devices. It seems to me that soon there will be no plastic cards - neither credit cards nor any others.
Egor: In terms of software development, everything is slowly moving completely to the Internet. It seems to me that as Internet speed increases, everything will move to the cloud.
Lesha: In short, Cloud is a normal topic.
Do you want to start a career at ABBYY? Come to our and fill out the form to be the first to receive an invitation to be selected for an internship, learn about educational projects, our lectures and master classes. We also regularly for senior students and recent graduates.
Source: habr.com