Director of Yandex on Technologies: Programmers from Russia - this is a long time a serious brand

Taiga.info talked with the director of Yandex Technology Mikhail Parakhin about the game on the button accordion, “Audova study”, “discrimination on the contrary” in the USA, the differences from Google and the high level of Novosibirsk programmers.

Taiga.info: Michael, you have a biography of a cool computer specialist, and who did you want to become in childhood? I do not think that from a young age you dreamed of programming.

- I have a completely ordinary family. Dad is a designer of missile engines, mother-chemist. I grew up next to the drawings of missile engines, so as a child I really wanted to launch missile models, engage in mathematics and swim. And my parents wanted me to play button accordion and danced, so I had to graduate from a music school. Of course, I did not think about any programming in my childhood. Now, raising their children, I do not know what they want, but they are engaged in swimming and mathematics. But I still do not force them to run the missiles-let them decide for themselves.

* Taiga.info: * Parents helped with their studies at MEPhI? I have friends - mathematicians, and I am terrified, hearing terrible words, such as "Theory of functions of complex variables." And in myfi, it should have been hard.

- It was enough to study Adovo. Parents helped, but even before the institute, when he studied at the Lyceum under MEFI. And at the institute, I got to the physical department of the non -physical faculty. There were 16 of us in the group, and after two years 12 were expelled. So there were four of us, and I had almost individual training. It was cool, it was always possible to ask about some things individually. But then there was a stick about the two -edges, it was not possible to freely freely.

My parents wanted me to play button accordion and danced, so I had to graduate from a music school

* Taiga.info: * You have lived in the USA for 14 years. Many copies are broken on the topic of attitude to just Russian and Russian developers in America. Tell us a little about it. Did you feel something like discrimination?

- I did not feel discrimination in general. In general, Americans are a very friendly nation. If you break through the wheel on Hayve, then five cars will stop immediately, and everyone will try to help you. Then you will not get out of them. But if we talk about the professional sphere, then everything is more interesting here. The attitude towards the Russians is better there than in Russia itself. Russian programmers are a brand, this is a quality mark. I felt “discrimination on the contrary”, I was helped by the fact that I was Russian. Our Renoma has excellent programmers and mathematicians. My foreign friends, when we divide the score in the restaurant, with the words “you are Russian, you count it, give it to me.

*Taiga.info: *You returned to Russia because you reached the ceiling? I looked at your career ladder, this is just an example and an example for envy.

- In the USA I had a stormy career growth, but I did not reach the ceiling. I have worked for 7 years at Parascript. We were engaged in machine learning, mainly related to the recognition of the text - handwritten and printed. There I became a man number two in the technical part, and then went to Microsoft.

I felt “discrimination on the contrary”, I was helped by the fact that I am Russian

In Microsoft, I worked for seven years in different positions, the latter was - the head of the search for pictures and the Bing video, what is called MultimediaSearch in the West. But then there were personnel permutations, and I decided to change the place of work.

A number of factors contributed to return to Russia. I was called in a variety of countries: you could go to the Google unit, there was an offer from Facebook, but in Yandex there was the most interesting work and the most interesting tasks. Well, at some point I wanted to spend more time with my parents, and so that the children plunge into Russian culture.

* Taiga.info: * Computer users can be divided into two parts: people who use Yandex and those who are looking for Google. How does Yandex win the Google in Russia?

- The machinery inside both giants is approximately the same, because we all work with one scientific articles, we go to the same conferences. In Russia, we are helped and facilitated by the fact that we are not sprayed throughout the world, but we work only for one country. This locality is expressed in a pile of things, up to knowledge, when we turn off hot water, for example (our competitor, by the way, does not know this). If we take the total number of documents, including English -speaking, then Google knows more of them, but in the segment of Russian documents we are ahead, and ahead is an order of magnitude. But we try to reduce the lag in the search for English -speaking documents. A separate story is the work of the company in regions that are a great many in Russia, and each with their own characteristics, sometimes at the level of the whole country. Yandex, as a local company, understands this is the best. For example, our translator knows the Tatar language, we are developing programming schools (Yandex.litsa) in the regions and we have offices in different cities of Russia.

* Taiga.info: * You are a specialist in machine learning and ranking. What is it, in a simple way? Not for mathematicians.

- Machine learning is a conceptually very simple thing. In fact, this is programming with examples, and this is very similar to how we teach children. After all, we do not explain to the children how to eat porridge, in this vein: we advance 17 degrees hand forward, with a contraction of the muscles we bend our fingers and take the fork. We simply show characteristic movements so that the children repeat after us. Something like this with cars. We can choose examples and “throw” them into algorithms, which themselves will understand what to do by studying with these examples. This is called machine learning. It originated for a long time, but the last 20 years, computers have become much more powerful every year, and this industry has grown in exposure. Now almost everyone uses such algorithms. With their help, you can train cars more complex models than things programmed with "hands". As for the ranking, this is the sizes of machine learning, when the best should be given out among many indicators. So we work, for example, Alice (Voice Assistant Yandex). You tell her a replica, she is from all possible options, based on ranking, gives you an optimal answer.

* Taiga.info: * Voice assistants always wear female names. Why Alice? Why not Anton, for example? Because you can adapt to English as Alice?

- It was a rather large project for us. And the name of Alice is taken for a reason. We did a study on this subject, and got exactly the same results as our colleagues around the world. In general, people prefer a female image, both men and women. Apparently this is something subconscious, but here I am already theorizing. The female image is less menacingly perceived by people, a male voice is much more difficult to do. And this is very clearly visible in the results of research. I do not exclude the fact that someday we can add a male character, but we decided to start with a female name. There is also a separate topic, as we chose it. It was a lot of work, we did not just take Alice, it is not Alice in the after-grade or something like that. We gained many names, made a giant survey on our crowdsing platform Yandex. Toloka, where they asked people to compare the names. It turned out that people have not tangible in advance, but still very clear bias in relation to the names. Milen’s name half of the respondents was noted as something insincere. I do not want to offend Milena, but there is such an opinion on the audience. And Alice was perceived as the most open and kind. This name won by a large margin.

So I recently made a repair, so it is also difficult to manage plasters

* Taiga.info: * How do you manage programmers from your team? There is a common cliche that programmers are such unimportant guys, and in order to keep them in UND, you need some special tricks.

- In principle, it is difficult for people to manage people. There are features everywhere, not only with programmers. So I recently made a repair, so it is also difficult to manage plasters. But working with programmers is complicated by the fact that the explosive growth of this industry was ahead of the number of university graduates in these specialties and in general the number of people who understand in programming. As a result, now people now need much more than they are in the market. For steep specialists, respectively, great demand, and this leads to an increase in salaries. Now an excellent specialist has a very large selection, and the more serious the struggle for them is, the more difficult it is to keep them.

* Taiga.info: * Let's talk about programmers in relation to Novosibirsk. Novosibirsk is known for Akademgorodok, known for NSU. What is the level of Novosibirsk programmers?

- The level of training of developers and programmers in Novosibirsk is very high, which is why we opened two offices here. If there are many employees of a commercial block in the city, then developers are sitting in the academy. And this is understandable. There is an educational base, in the Akademgorodok there is a historically established contingent of people who are strong in mathematics and other exact sciences. We will expand the presence here. I do not think that the Siberians are somehow genetically different from other programmers, but they are definitely distinguished by the educational level, the level of training and motivation. Many other cities can only envy this.

Siberians are definitely distinguished by the educational level, the level of preparation and motivation

* Taiga.info: * In Novosibirsk there are two offices, a rather large team. What do they do, as one project?

- In Yandex there is no specialization of offices. All hinting managers are free to choose in which office they can put their team. Of course, all directions are present in Moscow. In Novosibirsk, and other cities entered the teams, which liked the local guys in specialization. For example, the main customer of the Novosibirsk office is Yandex.Browser. And although there is only part of the browser development team, this is a significant part. There are those who are engaged in the development of crypts (technologies that can find groups of users on their behavior on the Internet), almost the entire development of Yandex. Music is held in Novosibirsk. We are not afraid of the distribution of commands, it is important that in different time zones the work is synchronized and carried out constantly. In addition, the distribution allows regional offices to grow faster, which is also very good. You can’t drive the office into the framework. Microsoft once tried to make the office in Beijing (conditionally) is engaged in one project, the office in Munich only by another. This approach caused many problems. So the projects are different, but all of them are able to carry out children from Novosibirsk. Moreover, the same distribution of children on projects allows them to choose what they want to do without moving to Moscow or somewhere else. Therefore, talented programmers will remain in Novosibirsk.

* Taiga.info: * I can’t help but ask a question from my friend in a cap from foil, is it possible for the uprising of machines so that artificial intelligence goes to the war on people?

- It will not happen in the near future. Terminators are not expected yet. Yes, the cars improved greatly, they began to work faster, and they began to do some things better than a person. They play chess, but recently they learned to better distinguish a cat from a dog from a dog (I'm serious). But still, it remains a very narrow, very predictable, very predictable thing. Take, for example, an excavator. We can say that the excavator surpassed a man in the digging of the Earth. And it will be true. But he only knows how to dig. And computers, largely, remain such excavators. They do something very intellectual, but very narrow. We do not know and do not imagine how to do something similar to consciousness or the upper functions of creating a la term. Take our Alice. We love her very much, invest a lot of money and effort in it, but this is still an imitation of a conversation. This is a very mechanistic thing, a voice assistant, an interesting interlocutor, but not consciousness. Someday, such a problem may well get up, but I think not in our lifetime.

Vasily Volnukhin talked

The editors of Taiga.info expresses gratitude to Natalia Brus for organizing an interview and Sergey Brazhnik for a certificate about the work of the Novosibirsk office of Yandex.

Photo 1 - provided Yandex, photo 2 - facebook.com