“Work anywhere, just not in local offices” – I have something to say

I worked for the American companies SAS and C3 AI for 23 years. This, if anything, is a very expensive intellectual analysis of data from corporations and industries. Moreover, for many years SAS took places from 1st to 3rd in the world as the best employer, so there is some spoiling. For the last year and a half before C3 AI left Russia, I worked in the EMEA division with my immediate supervisor in Paris.

All these years, my colleagues convinced me that it is impossible to work in domestic companies: there is rudeness, chaos, employees are deceived, not respected and not appreciated. Over the past two years, many of my colleagues have gone abroad with the words: “Work anywhere, just not in local offices.”

I went to a domestic company. And not just for a domestic company, but for OMK, that is, for a group of factories (and at factories, “well, this is common knowledge,” there is always a long line of candidates behind the fence, and where people like IT specialists are not valued, everything around is covered in grease and fuel oil, and generally speaking).

Okay, about grease puddles – for some shops this is partly true: leaks do happen.

For the rest I have something to say. Let me clarify right away: no one forced me to write this post, no HR people came and asked. Those who whine are just fed up. It's good to whine!

My experience at OMK is a year and a half in a position in advanced analytics. Our team is doing the same thing that SAS and C3 AI once did, only from the inside. We travel all over the country (more precisely, to all cities with metallurgical company facilities) and have seen everything. Let's go through the myths from my former colleagues.

“In domestic companies there are soviet processes and communication culture, authoritarian managers”

I was quite afraid of this. Sovietism is when they say: “Run around there, the deadline is yesterday,” and no one takes into account what difficulties you have, does not listen to where you think it’s right to run, and does not agree on adequate deadlines. You just need it yesterday – that’s all!

Our reality is the opposite: they are forbidden to run unless everyone has agreed, in what time frame, with what expected result, what exactly needs to be obtained at the end and who is interested in it. It’s not that an authoritarian leader decided everything for everyone. We often say: “My opinion is that you need to go there, but don’t run yet, figure it out, talk to Vasil Vasilich – he can use it.” Next we understand and qualify the need to flee.

Also, that same “sovietism” is when leaders are bored, and they gather people for meetings, but at the same time they do not record anything, but simply tell some kind of nonsense. No decisions are made, no one prepares for meetings.

So, the reality pleasantly surprised me. Firstly, even managers prepare for meetings, and in great detail. My first meeting went like this: I attached all the materials to the invitation on the calendar and started talking. They looked at me strangely and said: yes, the newcomer does not know something, that we have read everything attached. And then they just asked clarifying questions. Then it turned out that if you did not attach materials to the meeting, it simply would not take place. Moreover, colleagues often send their questions in advance.

Yes, this doesn’t happen in every department yet, but at least with senior management, it’s like this, which means you won’t rot in your head. We really appreciate it when our time is respected.

On the other hand, there is still a special atmosphere. When I worked in Western companies, it was customary to address each other by name. Inside the metallurgy industry, it is still customary to call most people by their first names and patronymics, which is very unusual after the European-Moscow etiquette.

“If you go to the plant, it’s still the 90s there, beyond the Moscow Ring Road”

The reality is that in small cities people turned out to be more intelligent than in Moscow. In general, they are less anxious, playing “What? Where? When?” (and there is also an official tournament during working hours), they don’t swear and don’t try to tease each other.

Let me clarify: I communicate more with IT, process control systems, technologists, managers – the sample is biased, but still discovering the regions turned out to be positive.

I could never imagine that I would want to voluntarily visit any small town near the plant. But he was found. I caught myself thinking about taking my wife on some holidays to the glorious city of Vyksa – preferably during the summer festival of contemporary arts. With a tour of the workshop through, as it turned out, industrial tourism accessible to everyone. And of course – with dishes from the chef, a real Italian, in the hotel of the plant.

In general, Muscovites are exploring the world, yes.

“Forget about your MacBook, Baikal is waiting for you!”

This is a fact. With partial remote work continuing after the pandemic, the central office in Moscow where I work ended up with a stock of monitors with poor resolution and large black keyboards with large loud keys. The sight of them in the offices honestly scared me at first!

But I was lucky with the monitor: it turned out to be quite tolerable. The laptop is also normal, much like it was in SAS (I sighed for the MacBook Pro in C3 AI). Every time I go to the office I take my mouse and keyboard: I’m lucky that I once chose an “Apple” compact one…

And this did not become a problem, because I usually go to the office itself one day a week, and then only when I am not at one of the factories, which I try to go to once a month. Since I can carry out my duties, namely qualify and detail AI tasks with an assessment of the expected effect, do aggregate reporting on initiatives, debug processes, lead targeted projects, supervise focal initiatives, in many ways remotely from home or from my dacha.

My wife, who works in a state corporation, also intimidated me by showing me imported Excel. Everything turned out to be OK: Office is there! It took me a month to get used to replacing Teams, but I still got used to it, albeit with some hiccups. The imported Onedrive works fine. Yes, it’s okay, I’m telling you, maybe it would be the same with him. Well, just think, I started swearing more!

“It's not about money”

However, the previous salary was repeated.

There are also bonuses. Both for annual goals (for managers) and for participation in successful implementation. All that remains is to sort out the bonuses for the effects brought to the company, and we’ll get to life.

“You will be able to climb in solid oil”

He expected me to come to the metallurgy industry, dress in stylish PPE and be so handsome and courageous to stand next to the splashes of metal in the workshop. When they made the basement for the arc furnace for the first time, it was impossible not to turn around. Let's just say that the auditory impressions of smelting in an arc furnace are superior even to the visual ones. And the steel, of course, doesn’t splash: it’s slag, but yes, it scatters beautifully.

And this is the reality from the first trip: “Now it’s PPR (scheduled preventive maintenance), there is no rolling, but you need to understand where the rolls are captured by the rollers and what the side rulers are. Let’s climb inside a rolling cage the size of a five-story building, where hot things up to 5 m wide, up to 40 m long, up to 40 cm thick roll in, and study everything there in detail… Climb onto the roller table, be brave!”

I came out of there a little grimy, but happy.

People don’t wear a tie around the workshops, and you don’t have to be afraid of getting your hands dirty. By the way, I realized that my selection of ties has been gathering dust for a year and a half, and I don’t regret it.

“Monotony, which quickly gets boring”

The myth here is this: it is believed that working at a vendor means being transferred to new projects for new companies every few months, that is, different tasks for different industries. It is believed that when working inside the customer, you get monotony, which quickly gets boring.

The reality is that it is in our function that there is such variety that sometimes we want to take a break from it.

Over the next 10 years, looking simply at the range of “road maps” of individual functions and plants, stagnation is definitely not expected, we will deal with:

• Switching between the influence of the speed at which the product is picked up by the stand rolls on the moments of impact loads in order to reduce the end trim.
• Video analysis of the percentage of blockage and the class of scrap metal (with the need to ride on an overhead crane and distinguish 3AN from 3A1 scrap with your eyes: if it looks like some kind of garbage, then it means 3AN).
• Optimization and scenario modeling of logistics operations of the access railway track to calculate infrastructure development options.
• Analysis of factors affecting the progress of the technological process on the quality of the weld of pipes with a diameter of up to 1.4 m.
• Features of steel alloying, including the unexpected reduction of manganese at oxidation levels above 50 ppm, in order to minimize the cost of the ferroalloys used.
• Detection of labor safety violations with specific rules during shunting work on railway tracks.
• Forecasting the cost of building reinforcement to select the optimal moment of purchase.
• Recognizing the quality of the mark on a manufactured railway wheel.
• Simulation modeling of workshop performance under various options for installing new equipment (to simply answer the question: install four or five overhead cranes in the new thermal department).
• Predicting the roll tracking error for more correct control of pre-acceleration by the stand automation (it is difficult for automation without ML due to the slipping of the roll on the roller table combined with poor visibility due to hydroscale descaling).
• Automatic search on tender sites for requests for the purchase of fittings we produce for pipe installation.
• Voice input of data through a headset when taking measurements of the produced coupling with dialogue between the specialist and the voice assistant.
• Automatic analysis of unstructured employee engagement survey data and other ~100 initiatives will keep you from getting bored.

I’m not sure that life prepared me to detect an approaching breakdown by eye by comparing the pressure graphs in the piston and rod cavities of one of the hydraulic cylinders of the cage, but only recently I looked at them. And you know, it's interesting!

“Backward methods, no development”

There we were all at the forefront of Western technology, but in harsh Russian factories we would have to hit iron with iron, yeah.

In reality, the anomaly detection technique for early detection of defects in equipment operation is one step ahead of the best practices that I used with my Western colleagues: LSTM, RNN and everything else your heart desires. There are also LLMs. The computer vision group is cutting edge. Based on the recognition results, it is even trusted to send signals to the controller to change the position of the pipe during local heat treatment of the seam or to stop the technological process if it sees a duplicate mark. How the magic of computer modeling lays out a pipe blank into 30,000 elements, understands what will happen to each of them on the forming mill, and selects roll positions that minimize defects in the seam and shape of the pipe, I had never heard of before.

And you didn't hear. Shhh!

I also imagined that I would see what an open-hearth furnace looked like, and the men next to the “lava” flows were doing something with long iron sticks, like in the movies. And I was afraid that artificial intelligence would be like the moon. But the reality is that there is no open-hearth furnace, the electrodes are melting. The stove is controlled by one person, sitting at a remote control with a bunch of buttons and monitors. Alloying (bringing it to the desired chemical composition) – another steelmaker at his console with buttons and monitors + one operator at the vacuum degasser (where negative pressure is created so that everything is completely fine with the chemical composition). The rolling stand is almost completely controlled by the automated process control system; the operator adjusts the roll using side rulers and solves other difficulties, controlling the quality of the result. And it’s all in the sensors – take the data and analyze it.

“The carelessness is off the charts, everything must be dirty, the responsibility of local specialists”

There, in the western office, it is believed that a hundred kilometers from the Moscow Ring Road, drunken foremen are drowning reactors with balalaikas, and somewhere nearby bears are dancing. Almost. In Europe, you come to a factory – everything there is clean, neat, and well-groomed. But here we expect dirt, and people in torn T-shirts and without helmets swear. At the same time, they throw cigarette butts directly into the liquid steel.

First departure:

— We are entering the workshop, do not forget to fasten the chin strap of your helmet!
– Come on, what will happen to me? He's uncomfortable!

The man fell silent, looked at me and stopped. Until I buttoned it up, they didn’t enter the workshop.

Well, the 90s are over too. When entering the plant you breathe into the frame for the presence of alcohol, no saunas for you on weekends. Boring!

I must say that I also met exceptions in our workshops (not in metallurgical subsidiaries), but in general the level of safety culture is very high. I don’t know how they came to this, but now this is no longer a matter of paranoid control by managers, people simply automatically use basic PPE. And we’re not talking about excursions to the factory: it’s always ostentatious and neat. I arrive without warning, walk around the workshop with technologists, and not with tour guides, and there is nothing so ostentatious.

“Fuck you, not help!”

The myth is this: “At the factory, everyone who is aware of the nuances of production is always busy and they don’t care about AI, so you can’t get any help from them.”

The fact is that equipment and technologies everywhere have their own specifics. And interaction with those who actually work in this particular workshop is more useful than any experts in the industry as a whole, so you need to get local help. However, it is believed that these same locals are hostile against any visiting specialists.

It is a fact.

More precisely, they are not hostile, but distrustful.

But it turned out that there are nuances. As soon as you become part of the group, that is, you simply start working within the group of companies, and not outside, these same people understand that you are something like a member of the family. Perhaps not the smartest, not the most adequate, in general, some kind of brother-in-law or someone’s uncle. But I need to help this idiot, because he’s one of my own. For any workshop specialist, I’m just a stupid mathematician who understands nothing about the industry. But when you are YOUR OWN stupid mathematician, it’s a different matter. In some places I’m already a “stupid mathematician who understands ALMOST nothing in the industry,” but this is already level 80, it’s worth a lot and would be impossible in a vendor.

People are really overloaded: digitalization, AI – all this is secondary to them. We have to inculcate what is reasonable, good, and promising, but there are already many pleasant exceptions that become a trend, however.

Here's what happened with a Western vendor:

– Walk here, smart guys… They came up with some kind of intelligence! Well, let's show how you can do this better than us, the shop workers. And we will sit, watch, laugh with everyone. Just don’t ask us anything, you told the managers that there would be an effect, no one pulled your tongue…

Reality. Call:

– Good afternoon! Are you doing AI with us? I got your phone number. Look, this needs to be recognized from the camera, the training data has been accumulated here, we will mark it ourselves, display the results here, we will give all the input to calculate the expected effect. Please predict this with such and such regulations based on such and such. We will explain all the nuances, be sure to call once a week, if necessary, give us more often, or even better, come, we will find time for you… The rest of the technologists are also interested in analytics, and the managing director of the plant asked us to pay special attention. Just please don’t take a business trip for one day, it won’t work…

Digitizers usually run around and beg, but our production workers are already ready to help. And many people really need this. What’s most interesting is that we have bonuses for improvement proposals, but this help is not about finding money. People come up, show their ideas, and then are very worried that they are implemented correctly. After the first implementations of defect recognition, specialists in the workshops figured out what was what. And there is a queue of requests to recognize a mark, geometry, position, defect…

In general, I will say this: we certainly have authoritarian leaders, we definitely have processes with bureaucratization, in some places there is no correct connection between people’s efforts, goals, bonuses, in some places they can give you a bad rap, in others it can be very difficult. The world is not ideal, the factories are not ideal, there is no fairy tale. But the myths I heard in clean offices also turned out to be exaggerated.