Tiny Montpelier, Vermont (pop. 8,035 – the nation’s smallest state capital), where Russian Life has its offices, is also home to a company that outsources software programming to Russia.
We decided to barge in on them…
On Montpelier’s gritty, industrial east end, behind lumbering granite sheds and a hurricane-fenced slurry pool, is the den of Bear Code. Here, on the banks of the Winooski river, the New Economy has established a beachhead. Surrounded by tenacious denizens of the Industrial Revolution shaping blocks of granite for the nation’s graveyards and curbstones, Bear Code assembles and ships a virtually weightless commodity: bits. More specifically: software for Web 2.0 applications.
As if that disconnect were not enough, half of Bear Code’s dozen employees clock in several thousand miles away, in Moscow.
Michael Howe, managing partner of Bear Code, got involved with Russian programmers in 1998, through a college friend. One of their first projects had to do with software for visualization of oil and gas reserves. “Russians are in general great at the sciences,” Howe said. “So their programming had that level of scientific expertise behind it. They were building these visualization programs that would do sort of multiphase equations of oil and gas and water in the earth and then analyze what was going on under there… They developed software that was competitive with Schlumberger and Halliburton… it was the real deal.”
Key to the Russian programmers’ success, Howe said, was that they had been strengthened by scarcity. “One of the things that was always interesting about the Russian programmer versus the American programmer,” he said, “is that they didn’t have any hardware to sort of fall back on, so they had to really fall back on their software and optimization skills – software had to do the bulk of the work… they were good programmers and they were writing amazing software.”
At that time, from 1998 to 2000, as the dotcom bubble inflated, Howe and his partner had day jobs based in Maryland, and so they dabbled in linking up Russian programmers with the growing market for web programming. “If you said you had a team of programmers,” Howe said, “and you could put them to work on something, they were gold. People would be banging down your door.”
They developed a specialty in bio-informatics and had begun ramping up operations just as the dotcom bubble burst. For a few years, Howe soldiered on, finally deciding in late 2003 to move the operation to Vermont (his former partner pursued another passion and is now helping drag Russian Railways into the digital age), shifting their focus from scientific applications to database driven web applications programmed in Java. Recent clients include the New England Culinary Institute, 7Days newspaper, and the Overseas Voting Foundation.
In Bear Code’s “onshore-offshore” programming model, Vermont staff handles client relations and does programming (especially interface design) and project management, while the Russian office does mainly heavy lifting in programming. And the Russian programmers are so good, Howe said, that Vermont “can be a little bit sloppy with our requirements and they will overbuild things. They think of every single use case that you haven’t and go, ‘Well, okay this, but what about this?!’ Which saves you time in terms of taking months to develop a spec or requirement. It’s annoying some days, but it also sort of saves you, and at the end the product is better for their sort of thoroughness.”
the moscow office of Bear Code is a converted first floor apartment on a quiet sidestreet near Byelorussky train station. Six programmers wedge between tightly packed desks in two eerily tidy, orange-walled rooms (orange being the company’s signature color).
“Our problem number one is hiring,” said Ivan Gammel, software architect, and head of human resources. “It’s a very bad situation here, there are no people at all in Moscow. All sorts of companies are going into the regions [to find staff], like Saratov, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk…”
Whether or not Russia’s offshore IT market can expand, Gammel said, “depends on how the government will behave over the next 4-5 years. Recent reports say that by 2012 we will need to graduate 100,000 computer science specialists just to fill new job openings during that period.”
Bear Code hires programmers mainly directly out of Moscow universities, trolling through university online forums and web listings. “We cannot compete with companies like Yandex or Google or Microsoft… we offer mostly interesting programming tasks and flexible schedules; this is how we can compete on the job market.”
But Russian programmers, Gammel said, are worth fighting for. “The strongest thing here is our really good technical education. Indian programmers are very cheap and sometimes they do awful things… it is a big job to find a good programmer. Here all you have to do is take a student with a good technical education and give him the right technology.”
The second problem the company faces, Gammel said, “is a barrier in minds of American managers – it’s really hard to manage everything from Vermont…” At which point a prolonged debate ensued about how long it has been since Howe has visited Moscow, concluding with sheepish grins and, “but of course we use Skype.”
Pressed on the difficulties of bringing together two corporate and national cultures, office manager Roman Lvov would only admit, “of course there are differences in psychology and sometimes there are some tensions.”
He left it to Gammel to finish the thought: “For me it is easier to work with Vermont than, say, Silicon Valley. We understand each other better. They are small in Vermont, we are small in Moscow.”
– paul e. richardson
Russian Life is a publication of a 30-year-young, award-winning publishing house that creates a bimonthly magazine, books, maps, and other products for Russophiles the world over.
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