Several years ago I read on Habré about the scandal developed by Alexei Adamovsky with the Xored company. Sticky case, the company didn't pay the person money, and the main enemy in this story immediately became obvious to me. Another thing was incomprehensible. Adamovsky was hired to work in the Novosibirsk office of the company, and he really wanted to work in the Prague office. For the same money. I somehow persuaded them and went there. In general, his right, but then something else really hurt me - does a person really hate living in the Russian Federation so much that he is ready to get out of here on any terms?
Since then I have matured and grown a little wiser - I began to understand the desire to go far away. When you live in Ivanovo from birth, many things seem natural to you. Bribes to dpsniks, bad roads, acquaintances who were planted for half a gram of hashish in their pocket. Meager, simply ridiculous salaries of all doctors and teachers, the absolute absence of a hint of improvement, cops at every step, black salaries, and total disrespect for the law by everyone and at all levels.
Adults who have the Internet have begun to learn over time - everything can be different. Any conventional journalists can understand this as much as they like - they are still not needed by anyone in the whole world for nothing. But a good developer can move anywhere at any time, and live there is noticeably above average.
This state of affairs has cultivated relocation. Developer relocation is a big part of all industry discussion today. Articles are being written about this, communities are being created around the idea of starting a tractor, HRs from relocating companies stroll through the market of candidates with a royal gait. Many, many believe that the only logical career path is to get out of here and never come back.
The community condescendingly jokes about losers who have weak English, we all pretend that we, in principle, do not read articles in Russian. When you write a good article on Habr, people are perplexed - how can it be that this is not a translation !? Try to tell some Russian-speaking colleague from New York that you can move there but don't want to - it will laugh. He will not ridicule the desire to stay here - he will not believe you, and will ridicule what he considers a lie.
And I am fed up with shame for being Russian.
Russian engineers have built many very cool projects - one JetBrains is worth a lot. I'm not saying that we are the best, but I know for sure that we know how to be cool. We have places where they teach to program really well. I am completely torn when I see another translated article from ruvds, about how to render a list in js. Yes, we have thousands of front-end developers who will write better and deeper - just, I don't know, help them a little.
I have worked on large projects side by side with top Microsoft engineers. And here's what I can say - they are much better than me and my Russian counterparts in soft skills, team interaction, and in this business pragmatism. But if we compare our engineering qualities, then I did not see any correlation. We have bad engineers, they also have. The general culture of code quality, as for me, is even higher here.
But our country is really full of bad things to the eyeballs, sometimes it's so bad that no ideological loyalty will help you to close your eyes to it. When the cops once again help to squeeze out the conditional nzhinks, when the cosmonauts figure another librach at a rally, when you fix the suspension on your wheelbarrow for the tenth time in a year - from self-control and a harmonious theory that Russia is very good, nothing remains.
I have been abroad several times, and I really liked it there. But even after three weeks of travel, I started to get bored madly. These are not things that decompose well into logical arguments, I really cannot explain to myself what the matter is, but living here, our culture, our people, my loved ones, in the end, even the climate - all this is very significant for me. And when I cut along a mirror-level road in Spain, I didn't want to move to Spain - I wanted us to have mirror-level roads.
I cringe a little with resentment when they offer me a relocation to Denmark with the same salary as I have now in Russia. They either think that I am so stupid that I do not understand the difference in the cost of living, or they think that I should lick their shoes for "transporting a dirty barbarian to the country of white people." Or they don't think anything bad at all, but it's okay - I myself thought about everything for them. In the most negative way, because I hesitated to feel ashamed that I was born here, and I don't want to pretend that I hate this place.
This gives rise to a rather simple thought. But what if not to run away from problems, but to try to reduce them? I'm sure every country in the world has enough of everyone. And I do not discount - yes, most likely problems with the wrong state in New Zealand! = Problems with a bad state we have.
The nonbinary nature of good and bad is an obvious thing for everyone. But we still forget about it all the time. Russia is a bad state, Germany is a bad state. My code is bad, and the code of the person who just read his first Javascript tutorial yesterday is also bad. But his code is a hundred times worse than mine (well, I hope). And the word "bad" is becoming insufficiently capacious to describe the state of affairs. If someone says about our code that it is bad, it will devalue all my experience and all the work that I have done for years in this industry. Is not cool.
I have come to accept. There are people who are not ready to spend their lives at war with evil here and now - they want to live well in a warm and cozy country where no one cares today. Where your initiatives to improve your life are not drowned out by truncheons, and where you do not risk sitting on a bottle for a tweet. It is a bad idea to condemn such people, or condemn those who are more or less normal in the Russian Federation, because no one is obliged to live their lives in such a way that you would consider it Orthodox. Those who are stifled by the idea of living in this country, they were able to go through a difficult quest and move - my respect. But people, let's do it - respect my right not to want it.
The idea of living here, and trying - albeit unsuccessfully - to improve everything here - has the right to life. I will not sell the idea that you can take it like this, get the holy sword-sent-from-heaven and go to chop the heads of the villains. But something is still possible.
There are people and organizations that every day are engaged in what is called "the fight against the regime." There are not so many of them, and the choice of support is not very wide, and the results of their work are depressing. Well, they dragged a couple of their deputies into the village council, and then what? We are expecting that tomorrow we will wake up in the beautiful Russia of the future, the guilty will be lustrated, and good people will begin to govern the country democratically.
But I don't even know whom to support - because no one separates cultural and political. I am not offered the option to be culturally conservative, but to have the most free state that does not interfere with your worldview. In this sense, I found the most comfortable political movement for myself - libertarianism. At least they don't tell me how to be kind if I want to live well.
But just believing in someone else's idea won't work. I am a pessimist, and in general I do not believe that I will ever see big changes for the better in this country. I am now 26, I have two children, I have stopped growing and developing, and I do not believe that the boring course of my life will ever change. Most likely, the vector is set, and I will follow it until I die, the same as now, not capable of analyzing my actions, or of any fractures and discoveries in my consciousness, or in general to anything significant.
Maybe I will die in the same Russia as today, maybe I will break down and dump in Thailand, or maybe a very tiny chance that I will sit and explain to my grandchildren that the awesome place in which they grow up has become so because I once decided to make it so.
I have a podcast, and this, combined with habr, is the only opportunity to convey to someone the ideas that haunt me. I took a huge reputational risk and invited Mikhail Svetov to a podcast about development . Then he took an even greater risk when he pinned down to talk about it on habr.
The risk is because the developers are often apolitical, and Svetova, in addition, is customary to hate in a liberal get-together, because the rights of minorities are not at the center of his agenda. As a result, everyone is unhappy.
But as I said before, there is nothing particularly valuable in my life. My reputation isn't really worth a damn thing. I came here and wrote openly that I didn’t want to work at work, that I don’t give a damn about the product, that I didn’t know anything and I wasn’t able to. The articles were read by hundreds of thousands of people - and I was already burying my career. And then I received a bunch of offers and understood - yes, everyone should sneeze.
Cases with broken development processes, impostor syndrome, ugly management culture in the industry turned out to be painful enough for me to take the risk and write about it. The case with the situation in the country is a hundred times more important.
I did not move to Denmark, did not move to Tai, did not move to the States - and every second I am tormented by the thought that I am an idiot if I did this. But I can still do it whenever I want, so every day I have to fight temptation. And it pisses me off that this temptation exists at all. It pisses me off that the fight against him seems pointless - after all, even if I stayed, my daughters would leave.
I wish the desire to stay at home was the norm, not heroism.
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