Hello, I am a member of the Commmnune Editorial Department. In this issue, we talked to the first foreign engineer, Aleksei.

Aleksei IvanovDate Joined the Company：February 2023Team： GlobalRole：Full-Stack Engineer※ex Server Side Engineer

目次

1. My Beginnings in Russia
2. ──Please tell us about your career to date.
3. Discovering Commmune
4. ──How did you know about Commmune?
5. ──What was your impression of Commmune when you first knew it?
6. ──Why did you decide to join Commmune?
7. ──Was there a gap between before and after you joined Commmune?
8. ──Tell us about your work at Commmune.
9. ──What is interesting about working at Commmune?
10. ──In a word, what kind of company is the Commmune?

すべて表示

My Beginnings in Russia

──Please tell us about your career to date.

I'm a software engineer for about 4+ years now, I started my career as a full stack web developer (Angular + C#) in 2018 as an intern in the Russian outsourcing company called Arcadia on the last course of my bachelor of computer science. It was a very interesting and nice experience, the people in the company are very friendly, but after a couple of years I felt that the company can't really suggest me a new experience on the current project and also I really wanted to try myself in product development and also use Scala on the backend instead of C#, so I decided to work in DINS also as a full stack developer.

In DINS I was very excited by the power of functional programming. They provide a lot of opportunities to learn and improve both soft and hard skills and I really miss it now. After one year of work I assumed that I'd like to work only with the backend and only with Scala, since it's my favorite programming language and the great opportunity for it is a sphere of big data and data engineering.

In the next company OneFactor I was a data engineer and I used Scala almost all the time and it felt great but sometimes I missed a frontend part of my life. It didn't last that long because I passed the interview to Rakuten and so it was my dream to go to another country, I decided not to miss this chance and move to Japan, so I've been living here for more than a year since March 2022.

At Rakuten I was almost just a backend platform developer (Node.js + Typescript) and had a great experience working with the internal systems of the big company like authentication and the private cloud. But I felt that the big Japanese company was not for me, too much bureaucracy and formality, so the startup looked like a great place to work with more freedom, so here I am.

Discovering Commmune

──How did you know about Commmune?

When I was searching for the new workplace I found a great website Japan Dev. It is very useful for non japanese-speaking people to find a software engineering job.

──What was your impression of Commmune when you first knew it?

It leaves a very good impression I can say, from a marketing point of view everything looks very professional, the materials for recruiting, the presentation with the company values and the description of the company itself is very well done. But it is that if you know that Commmune with double m is the same company as Commmune with triple m. For me it was really confusing and I couldn't find and English version of the website because I thought that these companies are actually different, so I found out that it is just 2 different names for the one company only after the first interview.

──Why did you decide to join Commmune?

①Full remote working option, as I didn't know where I would be living in Japan and still wanted the option to work from other countries for several weeks at a time, for example.②Few interviews and fast feedback③Company values match④The company is small compared to Rakuten e.g.⑤The company has plans to expand to external markets, so if for some reason I decided to leave Japan, I would be able to stay with the company⑥Short performance review cycle⑦More or less clear understanding of what the company does and what I should do (this is a big problem in small companies as I found during the other interviews)⑧Clear salary ranges

──Was there a gap between before and after you joined Commmune?

I think the most noticeable gap is the language barrier since not all engineers speaks English well. It’s hard sometimes to explain something to coleagues and to be understood by them, but they are doing well and I can see that for the last 3 months there is a significant progress in their English skills.

──Tell us about your work at Commmune.

I'm a member of the Global team, so basically I don't have a specific scope of work, we implement features that help Commmune become a global company, listen to our global customers needs. Also I was part of Productivity subteam, we significantly improved the deployment flow of the product and I hope to make it even better.

──What is interesting about working at Commmune?

・Fun fact that everyone use kanji reactions in Slack and for me as for foreigner it seems very unusual・Also I can learn some fun facts about Japanese during the workday e.g. that a lot of 8888 in modern Japanese slang means applause・The communications seems to be more open then in previous companies・Adoption of the new AI technologies is high, I’m glad we do an integrations with chat GPT and that I have a Copilot subscription

──In a word, what kind of company is the Commmune?

It’s still yong and open to the changes (both good and bad) but still a little bit too japanese.

──What do you like about this company?

I think that open communications and positive changes in development process that happen constantly are the best things in the company.
And of course I really like the pictures of Kanamaru san’s cat in his times channel 😀

──Commmune has a code of conduct called How Commmune Works. Are there any particular things you are conscious of in your daily work?

In my daily work I almost always follow these guidelines: open communication, straightforward communication (I try to give an honest feedback and accept it as well), eliminate meaningless tasks (I like to automate everything and remove meaningless tasks from my life for good), work actively, learn from history (especially from my previous experience in other companies, since I have a diverse background and I also worked in Russia I can bring some new things from the different perspective).

The most impressive thing here was an deployment flow replacement, when we finally finised it I understood that everything is possible and we can make our work life much easier!

Future aspirations and challenges

──Please let us know if there is anything you would like to do or challenge in the future.

I definitely want to see further improvement in our CI/CD, build time and e2e testing in particular. It might be useful to adopt microservices and microfrontend approaches for this, for now I don't think it's necessary, but it might be very useful in the future. The main challenge I see now is the QA process and I think we can do much better in this direction.

──Please tell us who you think would be a good fit for this company and who you would like to work with.

The other non-japanese speaker 😀 because together it will be easier to push some initiatives about globalization and to translate everything into English.

Message from Team Leader

He joined our team as the first non-Japanese-speaking engineer. While he has been in a situation where he needs a lot patience, he passionately worked on building a mechanism that increases the productivity of our development department. All the engineers appreciate the outcome. He is a skillful programmer with solid basics of software development and he is contributing to improving quality of our codebase.His opportunity to perform is currently limited to just one team, but I hope he will collaborate with engineers in other teams and work on a project such as expanding our automated test codes!

We are looking for people to work with us. If you are interested, please apply for a casual interview form!