GRIGORY BAKUNOV aka BOBUK: "IF YOU’RE TOO SCARED TO WORK ON YOUR OWN PROJECTS, YOU’D BE BETTER OFF WORKING AT A PASTRY SHOP"

You’re against offices and fully support remote work?

Of course.

But doesn’t remote work reduce the degree of collaborative creativity?

I don’t feel that being physically present adds much creativity. It adds control. When you work in an office, you feel like people are walking behind you, occasionally glancing at your screen. That’s it. I see no reason why people should torture themselves and waste precious minutes of their lives, which are already short, commuting to an office.

Most of the genius ideas humanity uses today didn’t come from people sitting in offices together. Take cryptocurrencies—they were created by people who often have never met in person. I can’t think of anything more creative in recent years than cryptocurrencies. The same goes for scientific work. If you look at the most interesting research publications today, you’ll find that the authors often have never met. Why would they?

You’ve always worked on your side projects alongside your main job. How did your employers react to your serious side gigs? Were there conflicts or questions?

Conflicts happened occasionally, especially at Yandex. I’m a very honest person: whenever I started a side project that could potentially compete with Yandex, I’d go to [co-founder] Arkady Volozh and say, "Arkady, here’s the deal—I’m working on this project." And I’d get his permission to work on it. If issues arose later, I’d say, "Arkady, we agreed, didn’t we?"

In all my time there, we only had one real conflict. One day, some colleagues and I were joking in the cafeteria about how launching a service to production shouldn’t take more than an hour. On a whim, I built a URL shortener service, clck.ru, complete with documentation and descriptions, in less than 40 minutes. I deployed it, and it worked for about six months. Then Arkady showed up, asking, "What’s this? Why are you creating services Yandex needs on the side?" I told him, "Arkady, what’s the issue? Just buy it." In the end, Yandex bought the service for the price of a cup of coffee. It’s still running to this day.

And if your employees did the same, would you be okay with that?

As long as I have no complaints about their main job, it’s fine by me.

How do you evaluate their performance? Should they work eight hours a day?

No! I don’t care how many hours they work. If someone takes on a task, sets their own deadline, and delivers on time, I have no issues.

But unexpected circumstances often arise, causing tasks to take longer, right?

If that happens every time, there’s a problem. If it happens once in five tasks, that’s fine. Again, no one is looking to catch people out and say, "Aha! You promised X, but it turned out to be Y!" However, when X turns into X², we need to talk. Either the person misjudged the timeline or they dragged it out. It’s not a signal to fire someone—it’s a signal to discuss what’s going on. Maybe they’re overwhelmed? If it turns out they’re struggling because of a side project, they’ll need to choose—either the main job or the side gig. If they can’t handle both, they shouldn’t be doing both.

What do you think about the trend of working two jobs?

The assumption is that one person’s workload is calculated for five eight-hour days. Now imagine someone is capable of working just as effectively for 16 hours straight. In that case, working two jobs seems perfectly fine—what complaints could you have?

Work isn’t about eight hours; it’s about using your brain. But people are different. And there’s one type of work we often underestimate—on-call duty. This is typical for DevOps. During on-call shifts, a DevOps engineer is essentially just waiting for something to go wrong. If you combine two on-call shifts across different jobs, that’s unacceptable. If something goes wrong in one job, you’ll be skipping out on the other.

There’s another scenario when someone rises high enough—for example, becoming a leader or a product person. They aren’t paid for sitting in the office for eight hours; they’re paid for thinking deeply about the product they manage. Realistically, you can’t fully commit to two separate, independent products at once. When I work on a product, I might literally wake up at 2 a.m. shouting, “I’ve got it! I’m going to do it now!” Someone working two jobs won’t be that deeply invested in either of them. But this primarily applies to people whose main task is to think about the product.

In your opinion, how important is it for a product manager to know hard skills like programming, testing, or design?

I believe a product manager should learn all these things and try to perform them at least at a basic level. Otherwise, they’re insufficiently engaged in creating the product, having their head in the clouds and not understanding, for example, the complexity of development. Reworking product plans becomes a constant exercise in consulting and taking developers’ word for how long a solution will take. The same goes for design: sure, you can have a designer sitting next to you, visualizing your ideas. But that diminishes the designer’s value.

Then why not grow product and project managers directly from developers?

Ideally, that’s how it should be, but developers generally don’t want to. Classical programming is far more exciting. It’s thrilling: you write a few lines of code and suddenly achieve a result. Change two characters, and it runs twice as fast. That sense of flight you get when coding keeps developers rooted in their roles. If you pay attention, most managers aren’t the strongest developers. That’s because the strongest developers find it far more interesting to stay developers.

In a DOU interview, you mentioned that developers don’t care much about the specific product they work on—they just want to create technical solutions.

That’s true for the most part. Hardcore programmers are typically indifferent to the product itself. They’re driven by the elegance of the technical solution, the beauty of the code, and interesting algorithmic challenges. They care about how beautifully everything is structured, which motivates them far more than users, who, frankly, just get in the way.

However, even among top developers, you’ll find different types of people. Take Markus Persson (Notch), who created Minecraft. He was an excellent programmer who was genuinely passionate about making a specific game. That passion led him to extraordinary heights. Then there are developers who simply love crafting elegant technical solutions. These are different kinds of people.

It’s similar to filmmakers. Some aim to create blockbuster movies with stunning explosions, while others are drawn to art-house cinema. They may occasionally switch roles, but generally, someone drawn to filmmaking for the art and someone in it for the spectacle are fundamentally different. The same applies to programmers. Some enter the industry because they love elegant technical solutions. Others enjoy creating something tangible that real people will use. And, of course, some join simply for the money.

Can you make a lot of money by focusing purely on great technical solutions?

Absolutely. Every large corporation has incredibly talented developers who earn far more than managers—by orders of magnitude—and are highly valued because every few years, they deliver groundbreaking technical solutions.

Andrey Styskin (a top manager at Yandex from 2019 to 2022) gave a talk titled “Where Is the Peak of a Developer’s Career?” suggesting there’s no peak—you can grow in any direction, and engineering skills are helpful in every field.

With an engineering mindset, you can achieve anything. The problem is that most engineers simply don’t want to. They’re happiest doing engineering work.

But engineers could lead countries, hold top positions in corporations, or govern effectively…

For a technocracy—a society or a state where management is handled by engineers or business-minded people who want to do things properly and know how—everyone else must step aside. And I have no idea how you’d achieve that.

Many years ago, humanity trapped itself: people joined the government to build careers. As a result, the government attracted a massive number of careerists and individuals who didn’t work there to improve the state but to earn more money. You can’t even blame them for this. However, you can’t simply replace them with better people. When you swap someone out for a tech expert, that person either hangs themselves, leaves public service after a while, or turns into one of them.

Is it impossible to use PR to increase the number of intelligent people in key decision-making roles worldwide?

There are countries where this has been achieved, but they are exceptions. You need to understand that there are politicians and bureaucrats. Here, we are talking more about governance from the bureaucratic perspective, not the political one. Political squabbles within the bureaucratic environment are a significant problem, as they lead to the formation of cliques and inefficient internal organization. Ideally, what you need is a leader who acts like a CEO — someone who sets metrics for the entire state and its citizens, creating a coherent system of relationships.

At one point, I attended a lecture by Jack Ma, who said he spends most of his time doing CEO work. When someone asked what that entailed, he had a brilliant response: “I make smart people at the C-level and just below work together. Only fools easily get along, don’t argue, and work well together. A strong team of executives consists of people who are constantly in conflict.” I generally agree with him. So, the job of an imaginary president of a wonderful country is to make these people work together. This is extremely difficult, and it has to be done top-down. That’s why I think we must look toward countries in Africa or South America, where there is strong vertical power.

Didn’t the Emirates succeed in doing something like this?

The Emirates had different goals. I admire much of what has been accomplished in terms of state governance there, but the objectives were different. The personal ambitions and interests of those investing in and governing the Emirates are far from monetary. You can’t definitively call the Emirates a secular state — a lot of moral and ethical values are embedded in its legislation. This actually hinders them from building an efficient machine.

So where are we, as humanity, headed in terms of state governance?

Artificial intelligence will emerge to govern everything. We’ve read about it in sci-fi. Honestly, I think it’s a decent solution.

Currently, most states are built on the European model. What does this mean? It means we have laws, moral and ethical norms, supreme power, and so on. The fact that laws are separate from the moral and ethical principles they’re based on already leads to conflicts. Here’s a typical example I often share. We have a law that says killing is forbidden. But now there’s a war, and people are killing each other. I haven’t heard of anyone being punished for it because killing is fundamentally wrong, but you can kill an enemy of the state if you’re specifically ordered to do so. There are so many loopholes like this, which prevent humanity from constructing a clear picture of the world. The ideal state would have its constitution, criminal code, and other laws expressed algorithmically, without ambiguity or convoluted linguistic structures that allow for workarounds.

I don’t think we’ll live to see the great state of the future. A wealthy friend of mine has a life-long idea to create such a state, spread across the world, with consulates in nearly every country. He’s buying hotels worldwide that he plans to convert into consulates. He’s already identified a small African state he could negotiate with to act as the host nation. Since the state is part of the UN, it’s recognized worldwide. And he has a genius concept. He says, “I won’t collect taxes like they do now. I don’t want a percentage of your income. I want a fixed fee. This state is for people who can pay $30,000 a year in taxes. In return, you can live in any of the hotels within the state’s territory — these consulates.”

So, you live in any country you want and pay only this fixed fee to the state?

If you stay in these hotels, yes, you pay this state. It’s an excellent concept — a very appealing IT-driven utopia.

At one conference, I had an interesting discussion about how IT people often see themselves as saviors of the world, thinking their work must drastically improve and save it.

There are many people who view themselves as saviors. Among IT professionals, there are more of them, which makes sense because, over the past 30–40 years, IT has attracted people who go against the flow. A world savior is often someone who swims against the current. So it’s no surprise — I’m sure the next person to save humanity will likely come from IT circles.

Why do you criticize outsourcing in all your interviews?

Because there’s no point in spending your life implementing someone else’s crazy, unnecessary fantasies, while not feeling any real sense of personal contribution to what you’re doing. You can’t deeply understand the product or work with it fully because, at any moment, the client can say: "That’s it, I want a different team."

But in any company, you can be fired at any moment, too…

Of course, but team changes happen much more often than layoffs. It’s quite straightforward: if you’re performing well in a team, no one’s looking to fire you. But if you’re doing well in outsourcing, there could still be a million reasons for the client to switch outsourcing vendors.

Take a group of people in outsourcing working on a specific client’s product. You could cut out the entire outsourcing layer—the middle managers—and just leave the team working directly with the client. Nothing would change. In outsourcing, there are tons of people simply occupying space. They don’t create added value but do add costs for the client.

On the other hand—I think it’s foolish for tech experts to work in outsourcing as it, surprisingly, often narrows your opportunities. Outsourcing employees often tell me: “But I have ten clients a week, different tasks, different technologies—I can try everything.” Sure, but you don’t get to choose what you try. You don’t control your trajectory or what you work on. You’re not just working for “the man,” but for “the man’s man.” What’s the point? You might as well work directly for “the man.”

If someone wants to work on IT projects but doesn’t have startup capital and doesn’t want to be a full-time employee, isn’t outsourcing their only option?

Let me remind you: Markus “Notch” Persson, the guy who made $9 billion, started with just a laptop—nothing more.

I get your point, but startups have a much lower survival rate than outsourcing companies. You could start a startup, but chances are, you’ll fail and end up working for “the man” anyway.

In that case, you’d be better off working in a pastry shop. Their survival rate is nearly 100% if it’s in a good location. You just roll out dough and don’t worry. The idea of reliability and survival doesn’t matter because there’s no tragedy when one of your businesses fails. You just move on to the next one, then another, and so on.

We’re running our own educational courses on Android and Backend at the MathMech department in Yekaterinburg. Students see how competent and personable our developers are, and they want to work with us. They don’t care if it’s outsourcing or product-based work.

I know how this works: someone comes in who’s ready to engage with students as equals, and it leaves an impression. Students think: “Wow, amazing people—working with them must be great.” It’s like imprinting. Like geese: the first thing they see when they hatch is their mother, and they follow her everywhere.

Exactly. But at the same time, we’re competing with Yandex, Kontur, Tochka, who are also targeting the same students.

And they all say, “Everyone wants to work with us because we’re the best.”

This is a massive self-deception. You feel like you’ve done something useful by visiting students and sharing knowledge. You think: “Oh great, the kids are happy, they’ve learned something new…” But there’s no guarantee you’ve actually been helpful. You’d need to evaluate that over 50 years. That’s why humanity has always hesitated to invest in education—it’s because the impact is so delayed.

So what should IT companies do to improve their environment?

Pay developers more. Give them interesting tasks.

And who’s supposed to handle the earlier educational stages?

Why do you think the same companies should do that? Ideally, it should be the government’s job. I don’t understand why you’re stepping in. Does it even bring any benefit? When you improve education in a state university at your own expense, you’re boosting the university’s metrics. That university might then decide they can do even less since someone else will come along to improve things again. It’s a vicious cycle, and you’re doing significant harm to the state education system.

Yes, I believe companies that step in to improve state education on a charitable basis are ultimately harming the system. If your goal is to dismantle state education, just announce it and move forward with that in mind.