The average age of employees of the NSTC, according to the HR-specialist of the company Elena Kolcheva, is 35 years. Both students, who are awarded academic awards, and graduates, scientists and engineers work in the office. Perhaps the main thing that unites the NSTC team is a special atmosphere of search, search for new solutions, new formulations, new relationships in familiar production processes, technologies and approaches.
“The situation at the NSTC is strange. On the one hand, a free schedule, and at the same time, a continuous rush inherent in a startup. Each employee can freely move between projects and determine the scope of responsibility for himself. The team is constantly expanding and some new ideas constantly arise both for the products being designed and for the internal organization, ”says Elena Kolcheva.
Despite the pandemic, the team does not want to give up office work. By contacting each other, it turns out to quickly solve emerging problems and at the same time communicate.
“Last year, when the pandemic began, I sent everyone to a remote location. And we closed the office for two weeks. This led to a real riot: most of the team wanted to return to work in the office. Yes, there are people who are comfortable working at home in silence, but most of the developers want to see each other. Now we are looking for a new office for ourselves, and people refuse even to walk on floors, so that there is always the possibility of continuous contact with colleagues. Such communication is in demand and works. But our free schedule is still fraught with a problem. We have a pirate ship, when each employee is responsible not to formal requirements, but to the team. You can sleep as much as you like and come to dinner, but you must not let the team down. This culture is the best motivation and discipline method. But I am more inclined to believe that the first half of the day is more productive for a person, ”says Vladimir Ulyanov, director of the National Science and Technology Center.
Often, applicants do not immediately understand that the NSTC is not just IT, it is an engineering company that develops specialized industry software.
“We aim at the average and above-average levels of specialists, although we also take Juns. Our experience shows that the best and strongest of our employees are self-taught with an engineering education, or who came to us from science. For example, we have a very cool programmer who was a car mechanic in the past. He has no higher education. People who are accustomed to the traditional programming culture with formal technical specifications and KPIs do not always succeed in our country, ”says the director of the NSTC.
According to Ulyanov, now the IT market is undergoing changes. If earlier IT specialists simply worked according to the technical assignment from the customer, now the complexity and breadth of tasks has increased many times over. The real sector of the economy requires completely different developments and principles of automation, which can only be handled by multidisciplinary teams aimed at a complex solution.
“The demands and challenges in the market are changing. The complexity of products has increased, the emphasis in automation is gradually shifting towards real production. Until now, most of the programmers have been employed in the virtual sphere, all these games, social networks, endless advertising. But now it has become clear that real production also needs digitalization. At the enterprise level, challenges arise for organizational transformation, which is impossible without the introduction of fundamentally new platforms and tools. There are not many IT advances in real production. All new mathematical tools, artificial intelligence, machine learning - it's all about the virtual economy, "selling money for money." And we initially worked with real production, were engaged in applied scientific problems, engineering. We grew from a service company to a grocery one, so to speak. In this I see the main attraction for employees who want to change the world. We are paving the way for global solutions, ”says Ulyanov.
Another feature is the creation of software with its simultaneous implementation in enterprises. This happens together with customers: for these purposes we have learned to create joint teams of experts and analysts, scientists and engineers, customers and performers.
“The ratio between the number of programmers, analysts and scientists in the NSTC is about 1: 4. That is, there are 4 engineers for every developer-programmer. And that's not counting the modeling department - our scientists. This is a feature: the team is more scientific and technical than a programmer, ”adds Vladimir Ulyanov.