JetBrains suspends R&D activities in Russia and sales in Russia and Belarus | Hacker News Reader

JetBrains suspends R&D activities in Russia and sales in Russia and Belarus

blog.jetbrains.com

141 pointsmrkwse32 comments

Looks like they've already removed their Russian locations from the contact page on their website.

Compare the current page [1] with the archived one [2] from three days ago

[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/company/contacts/#headquarters-int...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20220309000203/https://www.jetbr...

They never publicly announced how many employees they had in Russia, but I heard informally that they have over 5000 people there, mostly in the Saint Petersburg offices.

5000 employees with family members... even if many of them choose to quit, that's a lot of people to move across the border that can close any time.

From my estimates it's probably closer to 1500. They have 1900 employees worldwide: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/annualreport-2022/

Thanks for the link. Indeed, looking at the their buildings in SpB [1], 1500 looks more reasonable.

2 towers, 8 floors, max 100 people at each floor = 1600. And they clearly built the towers with extra capacity in mind.

Still... knowing how difficult it was for 10x smaller PandaDoc to evacuate from Belarus in similar circumstances in 2020, I wish them all the luck.

[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/company/contacts/st-petersburg/

Does anyone know how that works ? I'd be open to seeing what is the internal communication. Will the Russian employees be in furlough ? Will they cut access ? How is the business supposed to move forward ?

It's hard to see how they could pay people with so many financial institutions cutting ties.

I guess JetBrains will help those willing to move abroad. Others will be fired with severance paid from funds remaining in Russian banks.

Buildings will remain unoccupied.

My understanding is, that there really is no issue paying. There are only 7 banks hit by full sanctions IIRC.

If Russia wanted to double down on cyber attacks, kidnapping some senior dev families and forcing them to compromise JetBrains could be something they might try. I don’t even know what else to use for c++ dev, JetBrains tools are so far ahead of everyone else. Visual studio is so unpleasant to use and needs resharper to be usable

Realistically I don't think there is a chance of that happening. Jetbrains was based out of Moscow (they are a Russian company IIRC) but now they have offices around the globe. If Russia tied doing this, JetBrains would immediately cut off access to those offices/workers and probably sound the alarm to the media on what is going on.

The Chinese government sometimes imprisons family members of people living abroad to force those abroad to do things. Why would a monster like putin shy away from that? JetBrains can’t really stop it, 1500/1900 of their staff are Russian (according to the other posts here). The founders are Russian. Many will have vulnerable family in Russia

Never based out of Moscow, never a Russian company. The founders are Russian but the company has always been based in Prague, although a lot of the employees work from Russia.

Based on relative size of Russian and Prague offices, around 1500 out of total 1900 employees worked in Russia.

And core employees are Russian, with many having relocated at some point in the past; here are most of the people from this list: https://www.jetbrains.com/company/people/

- CEO is a Russian who lives in Cyprus now: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sergey-dmitriev-05b581/

- Cofounder is Russian, probably lives in Russia: https://www.linkedin.com/in/valentin-kipyatkov-13569590/?ori...

- CEO is Russian, lives in the Netherlands: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maximshafirov/

- CAO is Russian, lives in the Netherlands: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yury-belyaev-a1608b5a/

- SVP of investments is Russian, lives in Russia: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yaivanov/

- development lead is Russian, lives in Germany: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maximmossienko/

Kotlin was named after an island in St. Petersburg archipelago. Kotlin project lead is Russian: https://www.linkedin.com/in/relizarov/

Kotlin core contributors seem to be mostly Russian: https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/graphs/contributors

So it definitely isn't a decision what won't have any effect on the company.

Maybe we have been living in that situation for a while already. Not sure if you missed it but Jetbrains has been somewhat brought into accusations regarding the SolarWinds hack.

https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2021/01/06/statement-on-the-...

and

https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2021/01/07/an-update-on-sola...

I never needed to slow down my computer with resharper to make VS usable.

I can only use Clion for cpp, I cant deal with anything else

I use clion and have Jetbrains for years, recently two years I'm 100% with vim and decided to not continue renewing Jetbrains(including clion), and yes vim works for c++ with everything I needed(coc.nvim, ale, modern c++ plugins, gdb gui frontend debuggers,etc)

Russia looks set to remove trademark protection and has already removed patent protection from JetBrains (along with basically the entire west) - could be related to why now rather than earlier: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/03/09/russia-al...

It's not about trademarks, patents or licenses. JetBrains made a public statement against the war in Ukraine, now they fear for the safety of the employees left in Russia.

Being in a rough neighborhood, "founded in Prague, Czech Republic, 22 years ago" their position about Russia's "special military operation" is more than the usual vapid posturing by entities with little or no skin in the game, but you would think they would have thought about their vulnerable employees still in Russia before publicizing that position. Makes me wonder what else they might do purely for "political" reasons; another reason I'll be sticking with my FOSS development tools.

> another reason I'll be sticking with my FOSS development tools.

Here is the repository for IntelliJ [1]. It has an Apache 2.0 license. That is - by any definition - FOSS.

It’s clear you have some form of agenda with “political reasons” mentioned. Why not stop being coy and spell it out?

[1]: https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community

While he was a bit of a bellend, Intellij Community is a faint shadow of what you get in the professional-grade tools which are closed source.

Why does that matter? I am personally happy that so much of what they make is free and OSS, and they are entitled to a business for other things too.

Given the recent many displays of Russian government incompetence, I doubt that they will connect the dots fast enough to repress people like them on an individual level (or at least I hope so). It seems they have plenty of actual protestors in the streets to arrest. Should keep them busy for a while. This could be, in fact, the best moment for JetBrains to act.

There are political risks to staying as well. They are quite a high profile company within Russia, the government could walk in and demand access to servers or cut them off from the internet in retaliation to the sanctions.

Are they? For a developer audience, sure. But I think there's a reason why they were considered "obscure" but past reporting regarding SolarWinds. They make amazing products, but developer tools aren't exactly a thing most people know about.

It sounds like there are activities that they did not suspend in Russia and that may be more telling than what they have suspended.

I wonder how many Russian developers they manage to move out? If it's not a lot then the business must be impactly a lot considering the number of Russian employees.

Wondering how many laid off?

Why? None. JB is a very rich company.

Might not be a choice. I had coworkers in Crimea when that annexation happened working remote for a US company, and they not only were immediately let go - but were not given the rest of their paycheck. Not because we wanted to, but because it was suddenly illegal to employ them and illegal to send money to them due to sanctions.

Jb is in Czech officially, but these sanctions are also far more inclusive this time.

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