Check out JetBrains' new R&D office in St. Petersburg | Hacker News Reader

Check out JetBrains' new R&D office in St. Petersburg

blog.jetbrains.com

82 pointsrdemmer81 comments

Looks amazing. I'm really glad to see Jetbrains do well, they're one of my favourite companies. They deserve their success, their products are fantastic.

it's so refreshing to see a company rising from somewhere else than the western world. Somehow it's almost too bad they chose the google style for their office it's not exotic enough for my westerner's eyes.

I'm a fanboy: since 2005, I have made all my employer buy some of their products, and when I have no employer, I buy some myself. (on a side note, I didn't know they where in Russia, I always assumed they were based in Central Europe)

Hiding around the corner just might be something strange and exotic enough for you :-) http://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2013/06/04/jetbrains-hackatho...

> I always assumed they were based in Central Europe

they have headquarters in Prague

hhariri writes, "The Sales office is located in Prague, with a small Dev department. Most R&D is in St. Petersburg and in Munich."

Prague, what a beautiful city to work in.

Why would you expect it to be exotic? Russia is not Asia culturally, it's not East in any way except for geography.

Their traditional architecture is way different than the ones from Prague or Paris, they have a different traditional religion, they have been isolated from the western world for 80 years. But I don't know their culture well enough to know what would be typical and different from the west.

I would not try to generalize Asia anyways, because Siberia, Saudi Arabia, India and Japan are all there and all completely different.

St Petersburg was built as a European imperial city, and architecturally it is still very much that. (Outskirts are different, just like in Paris.) Religion (Orthodox Christianity) and script (Cyrillic) are different from the Western and Central Europe, true, but culturally it's a vibrant mix of different European and different Asian (especially Central Asian) influences. The isolation you mentioned did happen but it was not total, and I would say in some respects (especially scientific) there was less isolation then than, say, before the XIX century.

  - Vasili, come quickly. There are sunny photos from St.Petersburg!
  - Pfft, Nikolai, you should know better. That's just another photoshop.

Great office, fellas. Really jealous :)

Does anyone know why JetBrains, which seems to very much be a Russian company, has their head office in Prague?

Talent.

By being in certain countries you exclude certain talent because of discriminatory laws.

Russia for instance can forget about any talent that might be part of or supportive of LGBT. Not sure if Prague is better though, but at this moment most countries are better than 'state sponsored' national socialist attacks.

Not sure I'm following.

It was a guess on the reason, I guess I am wrong, but my point is still valid in general.

this lgbt rubbish would be the least of your problems in russia

rubbish?

He's referring to St. Petersburg's (and Russia's in general) horrendous treatment of it's non-heterosexual inhabitants:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/01/russia-rise-hom...

Yeah, no, Prague is no better. When it comes to LGBT rights, it's the same story all across the Soviet Union.

It's not perfect either but Prague is definitely better than St. Petersburg.

I'm pretty sure blinding people by shooting BB-guns at an LGBT meetup [1] would still be considered a crime by Prague's police department.

P.S. It's former soviet union states. And I think Prague was never officially a Soviet state, so former Communist countries perhaps?

[1] http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/two-injured-in-at...

But most of their talents are in St. Petersburg, so this point has no logic. You could use this reasoning if their (small) headquaters were in St. Petersburg and most of development offices in Prague, but in reality opposite is true.

It is the funniest reason I've ever heard. There's crazy shortage of talents in Moscow and SPb, so any employee will hire a gay, a centipede from Tau Ceti or a satan and shower him with money and lots of perks if he is good in programming. However, lack of gay developers is definitely not the cause of this shortage (after all, their rights are protected by Constitution and being in top 10% of citizens by income, IT people in two russian capitals have more options to defend them - living in Russia is not comfortable, but it's not dangerous as well).

He he, I remember 15 years ago when I told a friend studying economics and East Europe, that I had racist tendencies when it came to Russians -- everyone I had ever talked to for more than five minutes were an engineer or had a cultural job (musician, etc).

He coughed up some coffee and told stories about St P, the cost of life (well, the cost of death) and so on.

So, it is not dangerous now? It is good that things get better, good luck with getting rid of the present thieving criminals. If I still remembered some math, it would be fun to get a job there and see the place a bit more.

Life in Russia significantly improved during last 15 years, but crime rates are still high everywhere. However, it depends on your life style whether you face this danger on the streets or not. IT jobs are among the best paid here, so you can afford secure neighborhood. Modern Russia has large police force and a half-million army of CHOPs ("private security enterprise"), guarding malls, banks, offices, train stations and local trains etc. As for the gays, I've been living near a gay club in Moscow several years ago and never seen any criminal activities related to it (never visited it since I'm not a gay and there were too many drunken freaks).

Well, as long as you don't own a company worth stealing you don't get problems with the police (and other organized crime)? :-)

I've only been to gay parties a few times in my life. Very depressing, since they have much more fun than we hetero people. You feel a bit ashamed even, for your "preferences". :-( It doesn't matter, since (at least for Sweden) they have horrible music taste, Eurovision is the least bad component.

Exactly. Nowadays the only organized crime threatening a business is the government and "siloviki" (FSB, police, investigators and prosecutors). Noone of them is interested in high-tech companies unless they are government or SOE contractors.

I think you have no idea about situation Czech Republic and Russia. Work Law is influenced by socialism and way more friendlier to worker.

Any discrimination based on sexual preferences, sex, race, age and so on is strictly forbidden. One could sue for an ad which says they want 'younger' workers. Gay discrimination would be national scandal. There is also handful of agencies which are very keen to enforce Work Law.

There is violence against LGBT, but most cases are severely punished by state. What is 'war on drugs' in US, is 'war on neonazis' in Czech Republic.

I would suggest other subjects for discussion. For example the gay rape in US prison is widely accepted, comedians even joke about it on TV.

> There is violence against LGBT, but most cases are severely punished by state. What is 'war on drugs' in US, is 'war on neonazis' in Czech Republic.

HAHAHAHAHAHAH sure man, sure.

???

EDIT; My God people, I was just throwing a guess there. I Might be wrong in this situation.

The Sales office is located in Prague, with a small Dev department. Most R&D is in St. Petersburg and in Munich.

It must be quite funny to be in a company where almost nobody communicate in his native language. I've seen some russian language messages in youtrack followed by a stern response to write in english in public places.

The trick is always the same, when you use english as the common language in your company, you immediately give a strong communication power to native english speakers, they always look so confident when they speak. They look more professional by not doing mistakes, by using a wide vocabulary and by mastering the corporate lingo. That's a place where Europe could innovate: finding a third way between using English that completely obliterate non-native speakers in arguments and using hundred of translators, one for each couple of languages.

Ugh. I work in china where English is the working language. Many of my Chinese colleagues are very confident in speaking English, to the point that my advantage is limited to helping with paper editing when submission deadlines approach.

I have seen from experience that the command of english is a discriminator in the workplace and in negotiations. You seem to say something in the same direction by saying that it's because you have some good english speaking people around you.

Imagine they would be a vast minority, that most of them would be struggling to make a sentence, and that sentence would be hard to understand (this problem sometimes arise inside a language with local accents and dialects), how would meetings turn?

I quite expect they wouldn't meet the bar for working at an American company in Beijing. It's already worked into the hiring process.

If the company is american, then what I emphasized doesn't apply at all, it's absolutely normal that most things must be done the american way, and selecting people for their ability to speak with the headquarter makes sense.

When my wife and I were traveling in China a few years ago, young people were very friendly, speaking to us in English. Perhaps they were both being friendly and practicing speaking English.

It's the same in France, my GF is from the US and everybody including me speaks to her in english also she want to improve her french. Which of course completely reinforces the cliché of the American who doesn't have a strong command of a foreign language (the best way to make a prejudice true is to act on it).

Well, at JetBrains almost all oral communication takes place in Russian, while written is expected to be in English. And we have pretty stark engineering influence on culture, so corporate language is most of the time received with raised eyebrows.

We are working on an interview with Andrei Ivanov, JetBrains Chief Operating Officer, that will likely answer this. For the time being, JetBrains was founded in 2000 in Prague by three software developers: Sergey Dmitriev, Valentin Kipiatkov, Eugene Belyaev. The headquarters and international sales office has remaining in Prague while the company continues to grow.

In total there are 8 JetBrains offices, in addition to remote workers: http://www.jetbrains.com/company/contacts/

If my experience is anything to go by, I assume that they went to Russia to take advantage of the high availability of smart and importantly mathematically-inclined developers.

That's important for a company who are building tools that lean heavily on compilers/compiler techniques..

> Does anyone know why JetBrains, which seems to very much be a Russian company, has their head office in Prague?

I've long assumed it was for marketing and business reasons. So many of us in the west automatically are suspicious of dealing with a Russian company, especially when it comes to handing over credit card information. A prejudice for sure.

The Czech Republic, however, is close enough to Russia, with a closely related language, with good travel connections to Russia, is more integrated with the west, especially since 2004 when it joined the EU, suffers less from the prejudice we often hold towards Russia, but still has a low cost of living relative to, say, Germany, UK, or - God forbid - Silicon Valley.

Oh, and when you tell staff, "Hey, we need you to make a trip to Prague to visit the Czech office", very few of them are disappointed...

You are right mostly, here the full story (in Russian) http://www.xakep.ru/post/60338/.

In short: 90% of employes (including founders) in JetBrains are Russians, and founders moved to Prague in 1999 because of economic reasons. Headquaters remains in Prague mostly because of it was founded here and, probably, because of reasons you are mentioned.

Glad to see xakep.ru is still around.

Every russian IT company is registered elsewhere, because justice system.

So that's where our license fees are going...

yeah and thats excellent. I want the devs to feel comfortable when working so their products can get even better :) Besides i think their pricing is very competitive and that office probably cost a fraction of what hip spaces in SF cost.

Depends if you just fished out for TC, 3 build agents and 50 copies of R# (again).

R# is sooooo expensive for a company that can afford 50 developers.

It's not much better than VS2013 is my point...

Do you actually use R# then? There is no point if you are using it at VS level.

I did. No longer.

Some of our team are still struggling by with it and we're still paying for it for some reason.

Honestly, most of JetBrains license value can be recovered within a week.

I find their license prices to be extremely reasonable.

TC yes.

R# no. On a large solution it becomes a hindrance.

Why? How?

Performance sucks, takes visual studio out regularly when devenv.exe hits process memory limits. Tests don't all run. Refactor operations never finish.

That music room is an inspired idea I've not seen in an office before. Just being able to play piano for twenty minutes can do wonders for the mind.

personally, i'm not a fan of the "open" work environments, but you had a cat in there so that changes everything.

I wonder how that works out if they want to recruit someone who is allergic to cats?

I like cats, but being (mildly) allergic, I don't think I could work every day in the same room as one (sadly).

Most of developers work in 4-6 people rooms so it's not an open space environment.

Васильевский остров прекрасен как жаба в манжетах!

If I happened to live in SPb, I would be working for JetBrains for sure. (I am not)

The first sentence looks weird, is it google translate? (russian here)

It's Сплин.

Shame on me :)

  Васильевский остров прекрасен как жаба в манжетах!

Used to be, anyway. This is a general putdown of the city whose palaces resemble Versailles but are located on the marshland banks of the Neva river. St Petersburg deserves better.

(Loose translation of the quote: Vassilevsky Island is beautiful just like a toad with cufflinks.)

Too bad you can't put a rainbow on it.

Jetbrains is one of my favorite companies. Success well deserved. Congrats guys!

why do they need such a big office, i also didnt know they make this kind of money

but seriously , this must have cost several millions, why spend so much on office space!!

Growth, onsite events, etc.

Because we need it?

Currently they have 300 engineers, they plan that this office will hold 500. I see nothing too extravagant about that?

JetBrains is an example of what happens when you build a product that lots of people like, and then charge a reasonable price for it. It's easy to convince a boss to buy a tool when it's not a bazillion dollars.

I can't shake the feeling that this was paid for by Google basing their Android Studio on IDEA... ;)

But the community edition is available on a permissive Apache 2 license[1]. If I were Google, I'd only pay for IDEA community edition for the support contract (and to make sure JetBrains doesn't go out of business).

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

Looks like Google office in Ireland, so what? Only lazy does not copying Google in Russia,)

Nice, going to St Petersburg in January ,can i drop by?

Drop me a line with your dates, let me know if there's any particular team you would like to meet and what you would be interesting in seeing. robert(dot)demmer[at]jetbrains(dot)com

thanks! i'll be near Ligovsky Prospekt ,should not be to far,i'll send you a mail as soon as i have my visa.

Where are all the people?

Here are JetBrains office locations: http://www.jetbrains.com/company/contacts/

St. Petersburg & Munich are the main dev centers.

I think he meant "on the photos".

The video was shot on a Sunday.

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