Facebook, world's largest social network, has been known for aggressive headhunting. It is part of chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg's strategy. They've got special appetite for Ukrainians too.
Oleksandr Stashuk, a 24-year-old Ukrainian software engineer working in Facebook office in London, was a fresh university graduate just a year ago.
A native of the small town of Hnivan in Vinnytsya Oblast, he obtained a bachelor degree in engineering from the Kyiv Mohyla Academy and went for master’s in computational logics with Erasmus Mundus scholarship in Dresden and Vienna.
In 2012, he became a finalist of the TopCoder Open programming competition held on Orlando, the U.S., where Stashuk arrived thanks to the all-expense-paid prize trip and caught his lucky ticket there.
It was the offer of a six-month-long internship at Facebook’s headquarters in California. “The guy walked up to me, asked a couple of questions and just offered to apply for the internship,” Stashuk tells. Six months later he received an employment offer from the Facebook office in London.
The London office of the company, whose market capitalization exceeds $215 billion, occupies three floors of a big business center and employs over 550 people. More than half of them are engineers.
“I know at least 11 engineers from Ukraine. Ukrainian flag hangs on the special wall of national flags here in the office,” Stashuk says. “Whenever a new team member arrives and his country has not been represented on the wall yet, it is a tradition for the flag to be put on the wall.”
Individual productivity is valued greatly. For this reason, Facebook inspires its employees with many things installed in the office – musical instruments, slots, motivational posters on the walls. Stashuk says there’s even a real catapult and a big knight sculpture in London office.
“I don’t have time for using all this stuff, although sometimes, just to relax my mind, I might come and play with something,” he tells. “My day starts with a 20-minute bicycle ride to work. Most engineers arrive closer to midday, since Facebook office in the U.S. starts working around that time and everyone’s work can run at a same pace.”
It’s been almost half a year that Stashuk has been working at Facebook and he does not seem to be willing to come back to Ukraine. “Many people think of their own tech businesses, startups, but so far I like where I am and don’t plan to leave.”
In 2014 alone, around 5,000 Ukrainian tech specialists left Ukraine for better jobs abroad. “While there are around 100,000 tech people in Ukraine, these 5,000 are the most talented ones,” says Roman Khmil, director of BrainBasket Foundation, a tech education intitiative.
The majority leaves for such obvious reasons as higher salary, better career and working conditions, but there is also other stimulus. “Now 30 percent of those leaving are fleeing from war and economic crisis in Ukraine. Many frustrated with the lack of reforms, conclude that their children will have a better life abroad,” Khmil adds.
Ukrainian tech companies strive to keep talented specialists by providing competitive salaries despite the hard economic times in the country.
According to the Ukrainian tech platform developers.org.ua, as of December 2014, monthly salaries of senior software engineers ranged from $2,300 to $3,300. It didn’t change much from what it was in 2013. Improving working conditions, comparable what offices of globe’s tech giants have, is another way to keep tech people in their home country.
Kyiv Post staff writer Bozhena Sheremeta can be reached at [email protected]. The Kyiv Post’s IT coverage is sponsored by AVentures Capital, Ciklum, FISON and SoftServe.
