Conferences: The Talk Is the Product

Alexey starts with the scale: conferences since 2013, about twenty a year, and he will not list them all, asking nobody to take offence at a forgotten one. The flagships run twice a year, in St Petersburg and Moscow: Joker and JPoint for Java, Mobius for mobile development, separate events for testing and JavaScript; once a year come C++ Russia, Smart Data for data engineering, and conferences on systems programming, DevOps, Python and video technology. Then the biography: the Kupchino district, a maths club at the Palace of Pioneers, school 239, and the maths faculty, where he chose cybernetics over programming and defended his thesis under the faculty's dean, who, as it turned out, taught him much about management. By 2010 he could see his peers understood mathematics markedly better, while academic life moved slowly: papers, trips to the department, no tempo. IT had tempo — the iPhone had only just appeared.

He joined Oracle shortly after the Sun acquisition: the idea was a full stack — own hardware, own Linux, middleware, Java and end-user applications — so a customer could buy a box with everything Oracle inside. The acquisition brought a hiring freeze, so he waited three or four months for his offer and became, by his own account, the first or second hire after the thaw. For three years he built a piece of the Java Compatibility Kit, the system that checks the compiler, the runtime and the virtual machine against the specification, and realised the team was stewing in its own cocoon, ignoring how the rest of the Java world lived. The way in was simple: explaining things to one person is dull, whereas let me run a meetup for a hundred people and you will be the star works. The reference point was DevClub in Tallinn, one of the oldest Russian-speaking communities. Monthly meetups grew into a conference, then sponsors asked for a mobile one, and friends from JetBrains for a .NET one.

Alexey left engineering by the same logic that had taken him out of mathematics: catching up with the strongest people at Oracle would have taken five years of dense work, during which they would have run further still. In conferences almost everything could be improved: he carried a trauma from student academic conferences, where attention went into the paper while at the talk nothing was visible, audible or comprehensible. Hence the principle: the product of a conference is the talk, which means a prepared speaker, reviewed slides, sound, and a view from the back rows. Today that is what he calls a sanitary norm, and behind it stand dozens of people working all year round — hence the ticket price. Competition with Oleg Bunin and Ontico pushed both companies forward, and in recent years strong events have come from vendors: Yandex, Sber, Ozon. A separate observation concerns the audience: first-timers are impressed simply that the job was taken seriously; the second time they are often disappointed by more of the same; whoever dares come a third time joins the community's core.

The names were always given a twist — the participants tease colleagues whose conferences are called something-conf. The .NET event was originally written with a dot, but the dot worked nowhere, so in its third year he replaced it with the word do, producing DotNext. Joker was born at the opera: watching The Love for Three Oranges, Alexey saw characters dressed as playing cards, recalled that Java events are traditionally named with a J, and picked the trickiest card; the question mark in the logo nods to wildcards and generics. Programme committees run on what he calls federalisation: there is no single procedure. In some, a talk needs at least three scores and the last places are fought over; in others personal responsibility applies, like a borderline pass mark at university: if nobody on the committee will take a doubtful talk on and pull it up half a head, it is not accepted. Two conferences have a committee of one or two people, which is fine: members are volunteers and cannot be forced.

The second half of the conversation is about management. A manager, in Alexey's definition, is someone paid to make decisions, and their quality depends on how complex a picture of the world he holds in his head; hence his defence of classical mathematical education as a telescope of stacked abstractions. His sore subject is that Russian companies do nothing together: no shared products, not even joint research. He retells a conversation with a speaker he was coaching, who explained why a large company needs its own engineers, data centres and infrastructure — but if ten players reason the same way, they all build their own and fight over the last thousand graphics cards; a model excellent over two years and appalling over ten. Alexander translates this into metrics: DORA, SPACE and the developer productivity discussion give a dashboard, but pushed down as targets those metrics turn into watermelon numbers, green outside and red inside. To a demand for transparency Alexey replies with a question — who needs it? — since it is really about trust in yourself and in whom you hired.

The downturn is no abstraction: in April and May, Alexey says, they laid off a third of the team because there was nothing to feed it with. They return to the conference at the end, and Alexey corrects Alexander — it is not for technical managers but for managers in general: every business has its domain, yet management is the same in an army, a government body and a charity. Its level sits between tactics and strategy, where you operate units rather than people; by his reckoning L2, L3 and L4, roughly from thirty or fifty up to a thousand people. A week of online sessions came first: a conversation with Andrey Morozov about what a manager is, a talk by Svyatoslav Beryulin on the danger of KPIs and Goodhart's law, and Vanya Selikhovkin on project offices. Offline there will be talks on writing a strategy and the war over its implementation, on regrouping teams, on outsourcing versus doing it yourself, and on Dodo Pizza, which used its foodtech and franchise experience to try doughnut and coffee shops. They part after two hours, closing with an invitation to watch the ICPC final on 4 September.