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Comment by nik736 | Hacker News Reader

A bit off topic but what are all those devs at Yandex doing right now?

some continue working, many relocated to EU (Yandex is based in Netherlands)

others have taken offers from foreign companies

Yandex had like 3 different managers since the beginning of the war, because as it turns out a manager position at Yandex guarantees you a spot on a sanctions list

https://yandex.com/company/press_center/press_releases/2022/...

Maybe this will drive more interest in DAO development.

What's funny is the Russian ultranationalists think tank people have been talking for some time about how they need a sovereign internet like China and how all the pro-west liberals were exerting too much influence on tech policy in the country to do that project. However, because of the war, the pro-west liberals all immigrated so now all the tech people left are patriots and they can really get started on that project.

It's not just internet management that's affected. Currencies, semiconductors, energy — everything is affected in a similar way. Sanctions are a two-way street, they can have unintended long-term consequences (or maybe just consequences that nobody cares to think about) that are not necessarily negative to the target country and not necessarily positive to the imposing country.

Political views might be a factor but emigration is primarily limited by logistical challenges. You are assuming people can just leave everything and everyone behind and just fly into the unknown. Well, many do (and I didn't... yet), but without an EU visa, a new job, and/or a stash of money people often arrange to continue working for Russian IT employers remotely.

Writing open source databases, apparently.

Working and building awesome things.

From what I have gathered the atmosphere in Yandex is loaded and complex. Yandex is a huge beneficiary from the war but a lot of people in the company are conflicted about it.

How does it benefit from the war? I had the impression that they were caught in a pretty bad situation due to their outstanding debts and their suspension from nasdaq so that's very surprising!

Probably cause all of the other cloud providers are limiting operations in Russia

I believe cloud revenue in Yandex structure is quite low and main business in search/ads

It is not about revenue. They are basically state corporation.

Search/ads and ride/delivery services. As you may know Yandex has very advanced SDC system which was used(SDC robots) by Grubhub in Arizona University. They have delivery services in London/Paris and taxi services in Insrael and couple European countries.

As for the Russia I found news(in Russian) that McDonalds was huge part of orders in delivery service. Ads system fully broken because of Google suspension. Without concurents average prices will rise exponentially. Small business will not be able to buy ads and will closed in near feature.

I don't know if it's much of a benefit, but as an outsider, I assume Yandex will essentially pick up the entirety of the Russian market for search, maps, and other tools if US services are blocked or frowned upon?

Search and maps was already theirs. However they got chance to expand in Yandex Phone space (replacing iPhones/Androids) and perhaps in desktop OS space (replacing Chromebooks and maybe Windows).

Advertising, for example, is a significant revenue stream for Yandex and the advertising market has lost a lot of businesses, so it's possible that the entire Russian ad market is now worth less than whatever the Yandex' share was back in February.

They are basically "google of Russia" - main search engine, browser, etc. Waiting till Russia cuts off YouTube and the rest.

They basically adopt western open-source for Russian government (review and such). Their browser is Chromium, machine learning is Tensor Flow, etc. They also work in cybersecurity for Russian government (including conducting attacks).

> They also work in cybersecurity for Russian government (including conducting attacks)

Is there a source for that?

What. They are absolutely not a "huge beneficiary from the war".

The value of the company has plummeted and the only reason it isn't nearly worthless is because the stock can't be traded anymore.

Yandex is traded on the MOEX. It's priced around 1800 roubles/share, down from a pre-war high of around 6k and pre-COVID levels of around 3k.

Beaten down, but not "nearly worthless", and it is traded. (Not on the NASDAQ though.)

Oh I guess I didn't realize that Russia re-opened their stock exchange. Does anybody actually trade on it?

Also

> 1800 roubles/share

This is nearly worthless

The ban on selling shares by foreigners is probably still in place. So the price might be somewhat overestimated.

Russians trade on it. Maybe they do have an overly rosy view of the company's fortunes, I dunno -- I don't know much about their business, how sensitive it is to the conflict and sanctions.

The stock price movement is easier to reason about, I guess. By that metric they've had a worse year than Salesforce, Netflix, Uber, Google. I'd agree that the conflict isn't good for them, but "worthless" is a bit strong for my palate.

> Yandex is a huge beneficiary from the war

This is not true. On the contrary, Yandex's business has suffered greatly. You can see it for yourself here https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/yndx

The company's employees are almost universally opposed to the war, but opinions about exactly how it should be stopped are, indeed, conflicted.

Let me clarify this: Yandex would clearly do better without the war but unlike many other companies it will come out ahead as it can pick up a lot of business through "import substitution".

Benefiting from something doesn't mean you won't suffer losses anyway. At this point which Russian company isn't performing negatively different since the day of the invasion?

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