Yandex has it's own school within the universities where they recruit the best minds early on and train them. I've heard from programmers who now work at FB. That they could pass google's interview tests, but could not pass the Yandex test at all.
Add to that, Yandex Taxi is currently the second most popular on demand Taxi service in Russia. They might also be able to easily bypass many regulations we face here in US and get to a lot more driving data than google/uber/apple/lyft might have.
What does that mean? I think, the self driving car might finally give Yandex team something to do with all the talent they've been recruiting. So I would not dismiss their efforts at all. They could become a real force very quickly.
Yandex lost almost all good developers and it is continue even further. Companies rent offices near yandex and find yandex developers in the restaurants around this buildings and convince them to leave. This is very easy to make a decision to leave yandex for them.
Once i came to talk to yandex and ask - why they don't make good experience for mobile apps in their search results? Why they are not indexing anything related to apps? Answer was simple - user then will use this apps instead of yandex.
And such toxic ideas are pretty common in the company.
Talking about maps - they pushed out of the market one of the most awesome maps application in the russia. It had crappy UI, but it always make correct estimates and was able to learn your behaviour (more than 5 years ago!). While their app doesn't work at all but it couldn't because they need real drivers to make sane navigation. Then they pushed it to a taxis with a very simple trick - for taxis they made routes LONGER than it should be. This got them big fleet of a taxis. (sorry no proofs, but they are on russian and you won't understand it anyway)
I hope they won't be that successful with their crappy product on the roads (they failed in almost everything in last years) and it will be much harder to compete for smaller teams as everyone will say "huh, but there are yandex guys already!".
This video is a too dumb for a year of work. Voyage are better already, but they are a small team unlike yandex. Geohotz was even faster.
It is not a scam, it is basically a charity. First, it is free, no strings attached. You are even under no obligation to work for them afterwards (not even a moral one). The only price the students pay is that yandex becomes kind of an obvious place for internship, so many of the students apply (only then will they learn how to work with the "yandex tech stack", but that's the point of internship, no?) Allowing students to work with the yandex tech stack would be a hassle anyway - students would need to get access to the intranet, sign the nda etc... So these evil scammers teach them fundamental CS and machine learning concepts instead.
I guess the rest of the comment is similarly disingenuous and inaccurate.
It seems to me that the most common reason for leaving the company is immigration, which has nothing to do with Yandex itself. All my ex colleagues who left Yandex work abroad at Google, Facebook, MS and etc. Also I've seen many very good developers who cared a lot about their products. So my impression is somewhat opposite to what you described.
Is that true? The sample curriculum [0] doesn't seem to support that.
[0] https://yandexdataschool.com/edu-process/program/data-analys...
Wow, calling Yandex classes scam is bold accusation. Are you saying that the tech stack the Yandex is using is not from real world?
> Answer was simple - user then will use this apps instead of yandex.
Yandex is a business, not charity. It is the same reason why google will never use encryption in their email. Because they will not be able to scan for email content to display relevant advertisement.
Overall i find your reply very negative and zero value. You didn't pass yandex test, right? :)
http://www.rbc.ru/technology_and_media/03/05/2017/5908a5de9a...
Paywalled English version:
http://www.unquote.com/cee/official-record/3004782/ufg-backs...
However, on self-driving car aspect, they would not have major technical debt compared to Yandex who has the best mapping data in Russia as well as the technical expertise.
[0] http://freenews-en.tk/2017/05/03/on-the-russian-market-of-ta...
It's much easier now to get to that level - good multibeam LIDAR is available, GPS/INS integration is common and cheap, and powerful computers that will survive in the automotive environment are available. Progress in vision has been huge, there's good software for digesting point clouds, and 3D SLAM works.
Most of the hard problems today involve dealing with other road users.
Also, there aren't really any good high-performance industrial (dust and vibration proof) computers on the market, at least not to be bought easily. Please don't suggest NVIDIA -- starting with only a decent GPU is not an option, you'll need quite a few GFLOPs of general computing power to solve all that navigation, control, and, importantly, self-diagnostics.
By high-performance I mean at least a full four-core desktop i7 or Xeon, not some mobile CPU.
> Most of the hard problems today involve dealing with other road users.
The problem is, you won't get to dealing with those road users before you reconstruct the previous 20 years worth of technology in-house. It's not like there is some ready-to-use open source Stanley-level software.
Just wanted to bring some perspective about how big the journey is from doing a simple drive on video to having something that works well enough to be publicly deployed. We all saw what happened when Uber tried to publicly test way too early.
I hope this is an early prototype.
/s
There's a famous saying that Russia has two problems: fools and roads, and it's just as true as when it was first coined.
