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You failed one theoretical question on the Social Security, and they put an end to you. This is normal? // We Are Doomed # 3



Pavel Novikov lived in Novosibirsk until the age of 30 and worked remotely, collecting orders from all over the world for Upwork. One customer stayed for a long time - Pasha built a system for him from scratch, and a small startup turned into a huge company. The founders promised a great position, but then changed their minds and just fired ugly.

Again, Pasha did not take up small orders from the appliance and for the first time thought about relocation. So he ended up in Minsk - there he gathers a team to open the local office of an Israeli company.

Pasha came to us on a podcast, discussed hiring and industry with us, and even arranged something like a show talk (which didn’t go quite well).




We selected a few quotes from the release.

Why move to Minsk when the whole world is open for you?


Moscow and Peter at that time were just expensive. I'm not ready to give 800 bucks for rent. In Minsk, you can freely receive a Moscow salary - while renting and everything else to give an order of magnitude less. For me, this is a good option for a transit point on the way, for example, to Canada.

To move, you need to have a reserve, but now I just do not have extra money. For the six months that I spent without work after breaking up with a remote customer, I ate the entire financial pillow. Now I just need to earn money in order to have 20-30 thousand dollars free, buy a ticket and never return.

About upworking on Upwork


With udalenkoy happened some tin. After one incident, I don’t want to work with Russia. Usually I tried to look for a job at an appartment with foreign customers - I worked with many countries, but in 2019 the udalenka suddenly ended. You go to the appliance - and there is nothing. Some projects for two hundred dollars with incomprehensible requirements, either from the Indians, or from the Arabs. Scroll the screen four of this nonsense, send a few responses - choose the most appropriate - and they stupidly do not answer you. And so day after day.

About social security, where programmers are driven on theoretical issues


I believe that interviewing a programmer simply by asking him questions for ten minutes is wrong. Imagine you are hiring a designer. He comes to you, and you discuss for half an hour what brushes are in Photoshop, how to make lasso selection, how to work with layers and masks. And according to the results of this conversation, you should understand whether the designer suits you or not.

With programmers in the same way. We need to look at the result of this person’s work and how he thinks. To take a person to a live project, where someone’s money has been invested, to pay him a salary based on the fact that he said something? You can say anything.

Words don't cost anything - show me the code. If a person has a github repository - this is interesting. I love these candidates, it’s immediately clear how to conduct an interview. You open the project code and say, “let's rake what you wrote here.” If this is a complex project, and the candidate can correctly justify all the technological compromises that he made while developing, I will take it right away, without any theoretical questions.

Just tell me what difficulties you encountered. For example, there he sacrificed readability in the name of performance, or memory consumption, so that there was a good interface.

You can engage in fun conversations, but only based on code.

About stress during interviews


People get nervous in an interview when you act like a pretentious asshole. They already have stress from the fact that strangers will evaluate them - so these people also behave as if everyone knows.

In no case should you behave like this in an interview. You drive a person into a state of asthenia, and he cannot do anything, no matter how much you try to get something from him. Psychological comfort is very important, and most companies stupidly do not understand this. Maybe people have trouble with reflection, maybe they themselves have never been in such a situation?

About the problem of soft skills


There is a huge stir around soft skills - it seems to me that it is generally directed in the wrong direction. People talk about any garbage that has nothing to do with soft skills. Something there about being able to listen, being able to negotiate ... Guys, there are two main software skills - this is honesty and commitment.

Why should developers resolve the conflict and atmosphere in a team? To do this, there is an eychar director who goes through a damn cloud of various trainings on psychology and applied conflictology. Why aren't they doing this?

We are told that there are special people in the industry to solve problems. But if the eychars require developers to show their “soft skills”, then they do not do their job - their work falls on our shoulders.

The role of eychara is to be a mediator. Just put the developers in a circle and say: “Guys, let me moderate your discussion so that you don’t fall apart.” Two or three sessions of such family psychotherapy for developers - and conflicts resolve.

About work on open source and pet projects


I have three things in development:

The first is Reinforced.Typings , an extremely simple thing that exports sharpe classes to Typescript. It is very useful when you make a web application with a sharpe backend, take it, put the library, and all the controllers, all view models that you have, it took for you, and during the build exported to TypeScript.

The second project is not open source. This is the solution to the old eternal problem of the industry - the date of the grid. I decided to close its source, because it takes me a lot of energy.

The date of the grid is ... everywhere, in any components. Anyone who just tried to make a tablet with the “edit”, “add”, “sort” buttons knows how long it takes if done from scratch. If you take ready-made components, then they are all terribly terrible. I did a good one. This was confirmed already in several companies - the guys used it, they say cool.

The third project is Tecture. Architectural framework for business applications. All developers run into a problem when they start writing business applications, from authorization to some kind of complex logic. How to organize such applications? There is an official guide about unit of work and about repositories. But I believe that he is shit, and on large projects he is slipping into hell.

I thought for a long time about how to build such systems so that over time they do not slip into tartaras, so that you do not have to connect a database in order to test them - and finally came up with.

About impostor syndrome that is not treated


The impostor syndrome is still here. As soon as you do something that works in the modern world, you erase sweat from your forehead, and it turns out that you still need to make documentation, convey to other people how to use it, why it is good. A lot of contacts of people appear on your Skype who use your product and constantly ask questions like this, like that.

From time to time they come across places with frank architectural mess, and the code there is not perfect and in places is very complicated, especially where there is a cutting of data into different pages. The protocol for communicating with the server is generally not obvious in structure - I myself for two months forget what is happening inside.

And if you don’t answer a person’s question about these problems - for example, you’re sitting in the toilet, playing on the phone, and then they write to you. So, if you don’t answer right now, then they will immediately conclude that you developed some kind of garbage.

I have very little time and resources to do it the way it should be. In modern realities, if you are doing such a project - in fact, you are making a bicycle that nobody needs, which no one will use, no matter how much time it saves on development. Just because there are no bindings from testing, organization, support, tutorials and other things.

I look at my projects and think - what the hell am I starting this? Why is it? But am I an asshole?


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