 Hello. Can you say something? Yes, we can hear you. Good morning. Good morning. Thanks for having me. Okay, I'm nervous. So we're starting today's session. Yeah. Okay, you want to give us. Thank you so much for joining Sergey. We will. We're so excited and we're looking forward hearing from you a lot about the Facebook and your career wise advice for our students. And thank you so much for joining today's session. And we hear we have a dozens of students are looking forward to talk to you, ask the questions, and we'll have a wonderful session. I hope. Thank you so much for joining today. Thank you so much for having me. So I just hope it's going to be a very interactive session. So, so I'll talk a little bit about myself about my career background, and hopefully I'll receive a lot of questions from you that I'll be happy to answer. Okay. Okay, Sergey, let me introduce you to the audience. Sergey is a graduate of Kazakh British Technical University. As far as I remember he entered this university in 2007 and seven years, graduated in 2011. He was one of the top students in our university and worked in Silicon Valley in Bay Area for quite a long time. And his last employment was at Facebook. Right. And he is now looking for new opportunities. So he's back to Kazakhstan and wants to join other companies right. Not really, but I can come to this a bit later. Okay. So here from our side this is a students, some of the students from a British Management University. Zoom session. The Zoom session was started by Zayn. Thank you. That's me. Yeah, so he arranged and organized this whole thing. We also have Mr. Golib. He is a vice-rector for university's development. And we also have Monisa, right? Who is Monisa? I think the link is shared on our social media, but the people who are interested, they will join. I think you're an English teacher, right? Yeah, maybe. We don't know yet. So Sergey, the floor is yours. I think you will introduce yourself in more detail. Tell about your success story. And then students will have questions, I hope. Okay, and we will turn to Q&A session shortly after that. Yeah, absolutely. So let me start. So let's maybe start from the university times. So before the university, I just studied in a simple school in a small town in the west of Kazakhstan. The population of the town is just 35,000 people. It's called Aksai. And nothing special about the school, but I was lucky enough to enter a Kazakh-British Technical University in Almaty when I was 18 years old. And I would just be honest and full disclosure. So I entered the university without any prior background in computer science, right? Because nowadays, and actually during my times as well, there were lots of students who had some limited programming background, for example, did some informatics and stuff. And when I actually joined, like, my first lines of code were in Java, and it was just absolutely like some nonsense to me when they tell you, like, to write public static or in main. And you don't know a single word what actually means. That was when I was 18. So I started coding at the university and later on, I would say I would attribute a lot of success in the career to the interest in the lipid programming, which was very popular in our university. And I think it's pretty popular in Uzbekistan as well, because the semifinals of the ACM, ACPC, Olympic programming are held in Tashkent. I was in Tashkent once, by the way, so for the semifinals. Yeah, it was amazing. Well, what I remember a lot is like the food was amazing. People were very nice. And I actually came back with like, left over money because everything was so cheap. Thank you. So we were given some stipends on like to buy food and stuff. It was amazing. I mean, so, yeah, I really liked it. So, but it was just once when I would say the year was made in 2009 or so. And so, even though Timur Faridovich said that I was like in the top, top students like at the university, I wouldn't quite agree with that. I would say that like I was just like a regular guy and like who started coding just at the university and just, I was just grinding and grinding. And I kept on growing my like I spoke is and I remember like the university, there were other folks with a lot of background, but eventually it kind of levels out right because you know like in other spheres and other specialties. Basically, if you keep on going, and if the others are not actually improving, you can actually reach their level and even surpass them. But yeah, nothing special after the university. So after the university I started to work in a startup in Astana, which is now called Norsaltown, which is our capital. And over there, I worked like in a startup where we were working on like the online booking system for buying tickets for cinemas and theaters and museums and other things. At the same time, actually, because of my background in a little bit programming, which again during diversity, I was also invited to coach a little bit programming team in Azerbaijan University. And actually we had I had a lot of success over there I would say because I was learning myself quite a lot about the algorithms data structures, how to teach the courses. So like, I don't know, do you guys have like a background in IT over here or like is it mostly management. Currently we're a management university we offer mainly in finance and banking system, but at the same time we also provide a minor in IT. So the students were actually studying for investment and banking and financing accounting. So we also have the basic knowledge about IT programs. They're not really hardcore programming or a difficult coding language, but they will understand the basics about the code program. But if they are keen on learning more, there is a lot of opportunity in touch again they can learn a lot. So thanks for the clarifications in. So, I would say like I was, I was coaching the teams in Azerbaijan University on a link that programming for two, two and a half years or so. And I personally learned a lot during those times because if you want to teach something you're supposed to know this like from ground up right. When you're when you're studying during university when you just all you need. Basically when you're at the university by yourself, and you have goals to submit some problems right I want to be able to solve some types of problems. You don't actually learn to stop very deeply, deeply enough, but when you have to teach this is actually quite a different level of expertise right, because you need to know this from ground up you need to be able to answer any questions that students have. Because you don't want to embarrass yourself right. And so I will say that was helping me quite a lot because the coding interviews in the companies are mostly composed of programming questions. And I would say a little bit programming is probably overkill in this sense, but I can speak about this more later. So, in 2014, I was, I had an opportunity actually one of my friends and former coworkers. He was able to find a job in the startup in Silicon Valley, and started was named is named if see is basically beauty subscription service, where they offer makeup products and personalized makeup products. And there is quite a lot of technology behind this because of the personalization part of things. I was, I was referred by my friends, and, and that I got the first opportunity to to interview with a Bay Area company through Skype just like we had like side sessions. And like a few like coding questions right, and maybe some background checks and just like some small system design questions right like nothing special. But it wasn't hard, but I would say that I got there like, first of all, by the reputation because if the company is bringing you from overseas, they want to have some kind of connection right. They want to know who they are bringing right. And, and if you have somebody who can vote for you. So, we can say okay I know this guy or this girl, and they are actually great engineer. So, you should get all them. Right. So, that's actually, I would say that's, that's the main ticket to success like everywhere. So, as long as you can build the reputation beforehand. So reputation is very important like in life, and you will eventually find out that the world is so small, and even, even if you work in big tech companies. Everybody knows everyone. So, and if you actually screw up somewhere. So, some people will know this, you're actually doing amazing. You can do this as well. And you will, you will actually find someone through the second handshake or third handshake, who can actually watch for you or say something bad about you. So, I got my first job in the Bay Area through the just like interviews over Skype, and I was lucky enough to apply for a work visa, which one the visa. And I got selected in the lottery, the lottery at that time was something like 40% chances to get selected. And I was a little bit of luck over there. And that's how I landed in San Francisco into 2014. So I worked in the startup for three and a half years, and I was mainly working like, first I was like just a full stack engineer, doing both back and front and development. And then I was switching more into back end systems and then into data, big data systems. And then I was working more on the personalization part of the, of the system. So, just to tell you like in a few words what the startup was doing, let's say you have like hundreds of products every month, and you have like a million customers, and you hundreds of different types of products and like, some products are like 5000, some products are like 100,000, some products are half a million. And you want to compose bags with five makeup products inside. And the products have to be personalized for the customers because you don't want to send some mascara to someone who doesn't feed their eye color or like something like that. And the personization behind that like we were doing like mixing the job programming problem optimization over there, and then we're like scaling this to use like big data technologies to assign the bags properly to different customers. So, it's a bit technical but at the end of the world like it was great experience I would say. And after maybe 2017, I thought that I wanted to grow like further. And so the startup was a little bit small for me. And I wanted to get more challenges. And so I started to look for a job like in other places. Of course there was some like good preparation beforehand, and I had to prepare for the interviews for the system design questions for the coding questions. And how it works in the Bay Area is basically you don't typically go and like okay I want to work at Facebook, and I just go and interview with Facebook. And that's it right. What you do in reality you go and interview with different companies at the same time. Right. So in my case I was interviewing with Uber Airbnb. Facebook and Google. And basically I went through the rounds of the interviews. Some weeks were pretty busy. Let's say in one week I had like three sessions of interviews. Let's say with Google, Facebook and Airbnb. That was like a pretty dance week. And I had an opportunity to get offers from all the companies, all the four companies, and then you basically just decide like where you want to land. Yeah, there is a negotiation process right because like you want to make sure that you will succeed in the company, you make you need to make sure that like the compensation is good. So that you're paid like fairly, and there are many different factors as well. So based on different like, way in different like options, I decided to join Facebook at that time. And I can speak about the reasons why I joined Facebook instead of Google for example because I think like in our Central Asian countries is a common thing like to like dreaming about working at Google for example right. And as it is. Yeah, exactly. So, so, as you leave like in the barrier and you realize actually the opportunity that you actually can get in the companies, you make decisions accordingly, right. So, Google at that time, four years ago was pretty huge company. Even at that time I think they already had like over 50,000 employees right now is not employees but actually engineers right now is probably 80,000 plus engineers at Google. If I was looking at Facebook and I saw a lot more opportunities. Because, yes, Facebook basically, I saw that like say valuation of the company was at that time maybe half a billion, half a trillion, right, and Google was maybe $800 billion valuation of the company. But at the same time, Facebook had like more than three times less engineers. So it means there was more work, right, and more work means more opportunities more opportunities for impact. Well, when you're in the bigger company, you're actually, sorry, that's my goal. While you're in the bigger company, it's actually very easy to get lost over there, because there are so many of people just like you right, and you're just doing some regular job, and it's easier to find the comfort zone. When you're actually not growing. And you're just like staying in the company, you have this golden handcuffs of like great compensation and very nice schedule and everything and like good like perks, like laundry, and everything and GM and everything. So that was my decision about Facebook, I thought I was still pretty young at the time was 27 years old, and I could actually afford to work a bit extra, but to get more opportunities. So that's why I joined Facebook at that time. So Facebook years were pretty wild right, I would say. So when I joined the company first year was pretty tough. As you know like Facebook is one of the worst in terms of work life balance. At least that's the reputation. How it's actually going. Because I, you can hear like at Google you can work four hours a day and you just find you're just fine greatly. You're just getting fired in half a year. If you do that, or maybe even sooner. So, first year was pretty tough just to adapt to a bigger company culture, because everything is new to you right, all the technologies are new. Let's say the big companies have their own thing for everything right. So let's say if the open world like and open source World House has Docker, they have their own system for managing containers. If the whole world has GitHub, Facebook has its own like diffusion. So everything is kind of like native and mostly like scalable for the system for the scale of the company. Later on like you kind of adapt and basically you can deliver but overall I would say Facebook is a great place. I learned quite a lot over there. And I went through like the COVID situation as well. I don't know how it was in Central Asian countries like I know that because of some of the restrictions were not so bad right maybe like for a month or two. But I would say Facebook and Google and other companies in Bay Area. It's been already over 18 months that people are actually working from home. And it's actually quite stressing. People like you don't see your peers, you actually communicate over Zoom and like for internal video chats. And that's putting some toll like you don't have separation of the home and work environments. And yeah, there are some complications over there. And yeah, it's been four years and I decided to take a break. And I decided we had a daughter like my daughter is going to be six tomorrow. And as you leave, thank you. And as you leave apart from like a family, so from your parents and your child is growing far away from the grandparents and cousins and other relatives right on. You can't realize that like the family bonding and it's kind of it's very important. And it's one of the most important things. And you see that the child is already like picking up English and the English is already becoming the first language. And there is like, oops, what is it? We're still online and don't worry. Okay. And so yeah, me and my family we decided to take a break. So, I just left Facebook on good terms. And it was very understandable for my manager from my upper management. And there is always an opportunity to come back to return back. Actually, at Facebook, you can return back within half a year without interview. But I wanted to take a break until maybe like June, July of next year, and just spend some more time with the family so that the kid grows closer to the grandparents. And yeah, just to recharge and relax. Yeah. And I'm not actually looking for a job. So, I'll be looking for a job when I'm back to the Bay Area in June or so. You have a long break then. Yeah, it's amazing. It's actually nice to reconsider what you want further in your career. So you want to keep on working just like you were working or do you want to open your own thing, maybe start a new startup. Or maybe come back to the to Kazakhstan, rightly, because that's your home country. And when you're far away in the Bay Area, you have pretty much no one like close to you. You have some friends, of course, but still you're so far away from most of the peers and the people you actually used to work with friends, the family. So, you've got a way in, and it's always a traitor. In the chat, if you guys have questions, I'm happy to answer and dive deeper into some sections of what I just said. Awesome. All of a sudden, do you have any questions? No, thank you, Sergey. It was quite interesting discussion. Yeah, I mean it's a, I think maybe I will ask a couple of patients maybe Zane will follow up and maybe some of our students will. Interesting to share your story and, you know, and it's interesting that also Facebook is also changing, shifting into virtual world with renaming itself to meta. So, so what what's obviously you know, students are maybe they have different interests might have different question. I'm thinking about this for world to world. I mean, obviously, the COVID has accelerated shifting to digital world, virtual world. And Facebook is also kind of one of has become I think the leading technological company who has been betting on this. Yeah, everything they have. Yeah. So what do you think it's. I mean, how, how, how you use, did you see this coming working in the Facebook is this was a kind of step by step expected or the COVID has accelerated and then change the mindset of the company. Sure. So yeah, I can answer this question to my knowledge, because I would say I wasn't even close to product when I was working Facebook. So that's just like a full disclosure, because what I was doing, it was mostly about big data technologies and Apache spark and basically distributed systems. It was a type of stuff which I was able to do like I can go to Apple and do the same thing. I can go to Uber and do the same thing. And when you're very deep in the infrastructure work, you actually lose sometimes a bit of context about like what's going on on the product side. But I obviously have some opinion on this and I can tell this interesting story like like when you join Facebook you actually realize that like the main campus, the classic campus of Facebook where I was working is based on the campus of some micro systems. And if you actually know the logo like of Facebook, or like right now it's actually meta. If you go behind this logo, you can see the logo of like the sun micro systems. So when Facebook moved into this building, these buildings, what they did they just like move this brick around and just put their logo like on the other side. And actually inside of the Facebook campus, you can see some of the resemblance of from some micro systems. There is some crane like crown inside so it's like people ask questions like hey what is this and this is like from the past. So why Facebook keeps this stuff. So it's actually it's there is nice philosophy over there behind this. So what is that like, if you go back to some to Bay area of like early 2000s. And some micro systems was the top place to work at. It was like the founder of Java, right, like, and Java was like, was it was developed by them. Everybody wanted to work there. They had the best compensation they had that they were paying the best money. And later on like and they had like their bread and butter was like actually the service systems like like the service, and they had the solar service and they were the best service in the world. So nobody could agree with this. But then like that was the crisis right like seven and people actually started to have less money right like, you don't have much money to spend on like the expensive service and at the same time there was a rise of Linux operating systems. And more and more server server like technologies and people who are starting to serve their like web services and websites on like Linux machines. And some existence was losing their positions, though they didn't oversee this. And eventually they collapsed pretty much because they were acquired by Oracle and the pretty much died right. Facebook keeps this as a reminder that today you can be everything you can be like the multi billion user company. But if you don't adapt quick enough. You can lose everyone and you can be nothing in just a year or two. So that's the main philosophy and actually Facebook had to go through some stages one of the major stages was, you remember the times when like everybody was using desktop computers and nobody was using smartphones because they were not there yet. And Facebook was running a lot of ads on Facebook website. And then it's desktop desktop application right it's a lot of space. It's a big screen, you can put a lot of ads. Everybody was happy the revenue was going. But then like there was a shift in the technologies and people started to spend more time in on their phones right because there was iPhone release. It's found in seven or eight, I don't remember, but basically everybody was shifting to the phones and there was a big dilemma about, wait, how are we going to make money. Because everybody is not looking at the screens nobody's using the desktop applications and actually right now like the mobile Facebook application is outweighing the desktop application by a lot. And so Facebook had to adapt to this and they actually were successful at this. They could survive this but they could foresee this. And so what's important with meta and with the transition to the metaverse is that it's probably going to be the right direction, and it's a right bet, I would believe. Because let's say, when they were just desktop computers, people were spending on a screen, maybe 20% of their time. Right now, everybody has phones, and eventually we spend maybe like whatever like 40 to 50% of our time on the screens. So, and then when it's going to be met, people are actually able to live in this world right like you can just put on these goggles, and we just leave in the metaverse, and all the time when you're not sleeping you can actually potentially spend there. You can still exercise you can do like the games and stuff. So this is, this just makes sense and because it's all just like the chase for the attention of the people, because keep human eyes is limited resource like you either spend it on Facebook or you're looking into Google or you're looking to YouTube. So everybody's computing, and I believe that's the right decision. And the fact that Facebook is kind of removing Oculus, Oculus logo because previously we had like Oculus, and just like it was responsible for the br right now is going to be meta only. And so, Facebook is changing its direction, it understands that like just the web social network itself is not enough to maintain the company in the future. So that's my take on this. Thank you. Any questions from the audience. Hello, my name is Shoryukhan. I have the question. I think in the previous months or the three months and Facebook had some issues be what the Facebook didn't work that some period. So, the Facebook is a lost the billions values. What happened is in the situation. And the second question, a second question, maybe it's this situation could be the change the name of the Facebook. Do you have some information. I will say my, my personal opinion I cannot speak for the company obviously, but as you know, I've been like, I've been there for four years. And just when I joined in November 2017, actually September 17. There was us elections health and Trump Donald Trump won the elections. And right maybe in January or so like of 2018, there was even a bigger scandal, and the scandal was about Cambridge Analytica. If you remember there was some information about the leaked information of the customers. I will say when I joined the company the stock price was $170 and during Cambridge Analytica it dropped to 120. So it was like 3040% drop in the stock price. What's happening right now is a little bit different. It's obviously Cambridge Analytica was a huge thing and company took a great hit, but later on it could actually recover financially right. What's happening in the last few months. It's the information about the whistleblower right the Francis Hogan. I don't know if you want about her, but I would say that when you're so big and you have so many customers, and you're actually becoming close to monopoly. People might not like this right. And, but I believe that the companies like when the people the companies are so big like Facebook. They just survive and they have more opportunities and tools to change things. So, everybody is talking about the regulations for example in the US, or about splitting Facebook or something like that, maybe split what's up Instagram and Facebook. But if you look deeper into this Facebook is kind of embracing the regulations, they're quite happy about like government controlling some parts of this, doing a little bit of sense censorship. So they can actually easily invest when you're so big, you can easily invest into these regulations and adapts right, but just imagine like if you have some small startup, which is also doing some social network or like tiktok or something like that. What you can actually afford easily is not so easy to afford for them. So I would say that might actually bring even more monopoly to the company. And in this situation of Francis Hogan. I don't know her personally, obviously, but I know who she was. And my honest opinion is actually aligning with the official position of Facebook, what they said. So let's say I'm personally I was like, engineer level five, like, I'll find there were different engineering level. That's like senior engineer. What she was, she was like a product manager, she was not a project manager, or like she wasn't managing actual people. So she didn't have any direct reports. And she wasn't part of any kind of a high level meetings right, she had a bunch of information which was available for lots of people. Actually within Facebook like many things and most of the documents or what a lot of stuff is just shared and that's our problem of course because there are many leaks, but at the same time it's very open company. And I just wouldn't agree that she possessed any kind of information which was very like unique or something like that. And the same time she wasn't really managing and she wasn't really at the position to influence the company that because she was one of the, I would say the level of like 30,000 people or so. That's very questionable thing. I think she has maybe good intentions at the same time, you can see some. I don't know. So he's hard to comment. I just want to make sure that I don't get like suitable this but then. But I would say that he's kind of overblown little bit and overreaction from the side of Congress, because there was Congress hearing and like everybody was like communicating to her. It's, it's kind of like weird show, I would say, because she cannot say too much. She says that like, she can say that, hey, of course we can do better to influence the teenagers and Instagram and other things. But fundamentally, it's very hard to question and I wouldn't say like she's like the right person to represent or maybe like blow the whistle like so loud. Yeah, and it's not obviously not related, of course, like a Facebook or meta, I mean that's the change to meta was probably a decision which was made like long ago. Yeah. More questions guys. If you guys don't have it, I'll have it. I have a question. Well, thank you so much for a lovely session it's going very well. So the question is, we have here second year students at British Mound University. They're on the process of choosing their degree programs. So how was it for you like to choose your degree program and what to study, how did you decide and how to come up with an idea that you want to do this thing and for the future. Yeah, that's a good question. Actually I have a nice story about this. So I had a dream, just like as a, as I was coming from a very small town, you don't know much right you don't know much much about like Stanford or MIT. You don't even have like a lot of internet connection, I would say. And for us like as a British Tech University was like the top of the year university, it was just like, and go right. And, okay, so, I don't really know about this university but it was pretty nice. I don't know. It's pretty good right now as well, but actually it's pretty small. If you look at this, there are only four directions. There is like oil and gas industry. There is management and finance, and there is like computer science, actually three directions. So I was just like going outside of the university and reading this like brochures about the different specialties. I had my, had a chance to read about management and I was like okay I don't understand what is this. And I read about the finance I was like, that's not something I want to do. Oil and gas. I didn't want to work in the oil and gas industry and actually my mom works in the gas industry. And so I didn't want to follow her steps as well. And I also heard that like computer science was kind of tough. And like they have the toughest math challenges over there so okay I just wanted to take the charge. And honestly like when you're like, I don't know, like I had a feeling that like, I wanted to choose some kind of specialty, which is where you could actually be multiple heads ahead of other people and just make sure there is no any kind of like, okay this guy is brother of somebody can do this work or like, instead of you like so you're not taking this job, which is very often the case in the finance and management systems like it's, I don't know, in Palestine, I believe I was also doing it was like that. So of course there's like like top notch economists and managers, but still I was very worried that I could actually be restricted from the opportunities, just because I didn't have any connections. And in computer science, I mean, you either can code or you cannot code or you can build systems or you cannot. And nobody else can do this be just because he's some relative somebody else right like, so that's, that's what the reason why I actually like this, and I was into computers, but I wouldn't say it was. I was like, this is something my computer and like looking at things like looking at the hard disk drive and other things reinstalling the operating system. And I thought okay it might be the similar thing, but it was not. So it was completely new new stuff, but I would say I was happy that I joined it. I chose this path, and they just found myself over there. It would be easily that like I chose. I knew many students who were let's say golden medalist and other stuff. But yeah, I was actually counting this like out of 28 group mates of mine, who studied in during my year, only seven ended up working on the specialty. See. Wow. Like most of the students were golden medalist, and some of them were Olympics programmers for those who were Olympic program was they ended up to be programmers. But like many of the folks have actually had amazing background, but they just chose the specialty which was not correct for them. And if you look at the American universities, for example, let's say you join Stanford or MIT. And from internally from the US, you actually get a chance to poke at different things right like you can look at. Okay, you do some basic from the fundamental programs and then you try this right that and then eventually you decide like where you want to go, or you have a major but then you have a different minor. I would say like us is kind of better in this sense. And, and maybe there are less people who actually find themselves not like interested in the field, but in my case in the case of British Technical University. If you chose it wrongly wrongfully and you don't actually enjoy this and you don't like this. You end up in a bad spot. Awesome. Thank you so much. I have a saying. That's why we have a saying you know you need to have 40 skills for talents. You have to be ready. Yeah, you're right. I mean, even even Elon Musk, you know if you talk about Elon Musk, he's, he's not skilled in one area. So he's cross expert in many areas physics business. So now nowadays, I think you need the more skills you have the better your chances. I would agree on that and also like the better you can actually adapt the better you are, because times when you could actually say become an engineer in the United USSR, for example in USSR you become an engineer. And you start working on a factory and just work there for 30 years. And most times are pretty much gone like in the modern world, right in the world of technology. I cannot say that I will be doing the same thing, or like similar thing like maybe 30 years from now. So is the question of how quickly you can adapt to this. Awesome. And one more question. Yeah, I'm actually asking myself. What was your day like at Facebook, like a regular day. Can you just tell us what happens like from what time to what time you work, what time you wake up. What time you log off depends on like what period of time but let's say, maybe some of the best times I have one person just for one minute. All right, yeah, there is I think there is a person who wants to join to. Sure. I'm inviting one person for one minute. She wants to greet you. Do you want to guess who? No, no, no, no. I don't know. I'm just guessing. I'm not telling. I'm surprised. I see joining why is it right. Is somebody in waiting room. No, there is no one in the waiting room. Hello. Turn on your video. Can we see you. We missed your face. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Oh, yes, good. It's really nice to hear from you guys. Mark, special Salem from Baku. Oh, thank you. So my special hello from Baku to all of our students. BMU, please what does mean BMU. British management management University, sir. Great, great, great, great, great. So my congratulations to everyone. My, I'd like to really great success. And believe me, I'm pretty sure that what what you do. Is it on bad for connection? Yeah. Yeah, I think he was he's a very I like to his face. He's very cheerful. Very joyful. I love him already. He was the father of IT IT faculty. That's a nice person. Students call him father. Yeah. Godfather. Yeah. Yeah. I'll be able to listen to you. Oh, that's not that way too much. So I think he will be joining us anytime soon whenever he has a good connection. But who is that person who's going to give any information about him. So what Bay. Hi, he's here. He's originally from Azerbaijan, but he worked for many years in Kazakhstan. Yeah. In the ceremony in the Merrill University. And then he joined Kazakhstan British Technical University as a dean and then finally he was vice director. Wow. And after that, what Bay joined Azerbaijan University. I can't remember his position there, but it was one of the top positions. I think he's there. He is. Yeah. So he joined again. And he led this programming contest movement. Sir, your microphone is mute. So thank you very much. Thank you very much. Nice presentation of me. Many thanks. I just, I joined you for just for a couple of, for a couple of minutes and just for, to say thank you very much to our audience. Thank you and express my warm wishes from Baku and maybe from Kazakhstan also because I'm physically here in Baku, but my heart in Kazakhstan also. And maybe starting from this time from this minute, maybe my heartbeat will be in Uzbekistan also. Thank you so much. Good luck guys. Good luck and thank you very much. Unfortunately, I have to be in the meeting now. And so again, good successor everyone. Mark. Thank you very much again. Thank you for the thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much, sir. Have a good day. Thank you. Thank you very much. We need positive energy. And it's Friday, we need that. So maybe, you know, maybe I will, I will, I will ask a couple of questions that may be useful for students, unless they have questions. That'd be awesome. Yeah, so, you know, obviously we know a lot of our students are not it, they don't have it background, but they, they will probably need it to background to be successful. ground to be successful in their careers now. So what's what's what's your kind of recommendation on how how to or what to learn on how to learn it? Yeah, thank you. How to learn it? Yeah, or maybe just any ideas because you probably you work with business, right? So if you work if you let's say there is an IT comments teams you have business you have kind of IT developers and then you you kind of integrate and talk with them about these new products. So this business site domain knowledge site and then this IT site. Yeah, but I would say the majority of the if you just like break down the population right like and there's just a vast majority of engineers and then like after engineers there are engineering managers, but engineering merchants are the people who used to be engineers and then transitioned into the management domain. Right, engineering management because they are people managers they have to be proficient in technologies and yeah so so it's actually I would say in like in big tech companies it's more like a parallel tracks you can be an engineer until the end of your life and you can be let's say I see six level six or you can be a manager manager one you can be level seven and etc. Those are just parallel tracks. I cannot speak much about the business component because I didn't really interact much with people from business sites. It was mostly like technical program managers people who have some technical background but are still into more like connecting pieces together and more working on the vision of the company or organization. So yeah I would say that if you want to get into big tech or pay area of Silicon Valley the easiest way is to be proficient in computer sciences. That's the way to go. Or like I don't want to kind of like cut this like short like this and it's like okay sorry guys and I think I think there's obviously many different ways to pursue this. I just don't have like my expertise on that and I just I'm just speaking from the side of like the population. The majority of the population are close to the computer science. Thank you thank you. But you can always choose a minor of course like the minor. Yeah that's what we are we are trying to do here at no cost at no cost to our students. So we'll be giving them information systems some Python introduction to programming something like that. So they have some skills and maybe offer hand in the job market when you know the opportunity arises. Yes yeah but there is a big shortage of engineers I would say that and I just like personally see this from like the terms of like let's say salaries distribution. Let's say engineers compared to like other people in the same like similar positions but in other fields let's say recruiting or analysts or other things even data scientists. They're all like paid much less as compared to software engineers. So that's basically the top of the chain. So have you seen some people who thus who didn't have any IT background? Nothing and then they prepared themselves and they became developers. So do you need a degree in engineering or computer science to be a to become a developer? Yes I've seen some people like that and it's not a requirement to have a degree but if you want to enter the big tech the reality is that like you need to have some experience. So let's say you don't go ahead and join Facebook right away or like Google right away without a degree just because you finish some coding boot camp. And you gain some experience in other smaller smaller companies in smaller startups and after let's say maybe like three four years and experience in smaller companies you can actually use your experience as a degree and you just apply for the bigger tech companies. At the same time all the companies have programs for people who don't have engineering background who don't have bachelor's or master's in the computer science but it's those are limited programs. So I had a chance to work with a such a rotational engineer. I say they take you for a long internship which is called apprenticeship and you're basically spending in the company for half a year and you work like as an engineer and then like after at the end if your ratings are good and if you get good feedback from your peers you are basically taken as an engineer for the position of an engineer without a college degree. So I had a few people that I knew who actually became engineers this way but at the same time they had the skills right like and how you gain the skills you probably have to work somewhere else. Yeah thank you. Actually my wife right now she is like she likes this field and she likes coding but she doesn't have computer science background so she actually did that graduate from a boot camp but it was pretty hard to find opportunities in companies especially during COVID because all those like apprenticeship programs or like internship programs I would say they require more mentorship like from the people. Let's say you take somebody for half a year and you kind of like you have to spend some time to mentor them a little bit but during COVID it's really hard and so many of the companies just they just cancel the apprenticeship programs but some of them of course reopened but the competition there is so huge it's like hundreds or like whatever like people that want to apply there. So right now we are back to Kazakhstan and my wife is doing master's degree in computer science right now just to get more like opportunities to to basically get selected for interviews because right now it's even hard without the degrees even hard to get an opportunity to be interviewed for the companies. Yeah well that's kind of the reality I would say that. Thank you so much and I think it's time is coming up we have to wrap up the session and do you have any final thoughts to our students? Yeah it was a pleasure talking I hope I was hoping I would get more questions from like more students but I just hope that the session was valuable and I want to wish everyone good luck. It was. Just don't forget my words about the reputation so basically we have to build up a reputation from the beginning. Exactly exactly be a nice person be a nice team player and this will actually pay off in the future because things opportunities will just pop up in the future like eventually on their own. If you're not a great person to work with if you are not responsible that's that's going to be a problem in the future. I will say that just by the reputation you kind of get the connections and things opportunities are appearing in your life. And the thing I learned in while working in the US corporate world is also the value of asking questions if you don't know. Yeah so Goliap actually Harvard graduate, he graduated from Harvard with Master's degree, Master's in Public Administration. I worked a couple of years in New York and UBS and Bank of America so I I know this value of you know as you already pointed out positive attitude is very very important. People really need to like you then then the second important thing is ability to ask questions when you don't know and it's in our culture it's very kind of we are lean and backward people here so we are really shy to ask in equations but you know there you have to ask questions and that's how you learn actually most of the things. Yeah yeah absolutely I commend that. Okay Sergei thank you very much thank you very very well thank you it was pleasure talking to you. Good luck, good luck in your next stage. Thank you so much. Thank you. Come on guys. Thank you. We invite you to our campus. You have so much time. I'm pretty close here. Yeah yeah we will feed you. You probably make food. All right. Thank you so much. Have a good day. Bye bye. Bye. Thank you.