Sibers New Year’s party!

by Sibers CEO Serge Markov

On 28 December I had a very-very long day. In fact, it started on 27 when at night we had a sound record session for our NY party’s corporate movie. In fact, it was a popular Russian cartoon called ‘Winter in Prostokvashino’, and making the movie implied cutting off some parts and adding our voices and songs. We finished about 1am at night, but it was fun trying to get into rhythm of actors of the cartoon. So next day I started early by interviewing everyone in our company (or tried to get everyone) about last year results. I had prepared a questionnaire and wrote down every answer which was really important. Questions were like that:

• what can you remember in year 2006? (even personal and work ideas alike)
• what bad and good things have happened?
• what things were planned and not completed?
• what do you like and dislike in our company this year?
• do you like what you were doing this year?
• what do you want to try next year?
• what can we do better?
• what are your plans for next year?

I spent all day and talked with 29 people (that’s what my records shows), also several people were interviewed by our GPM Alexey Shpak. Of course I started with those who had been working since foundation and finished with those who came this year, but some juniors unfortunately didn’t get into my list. Really it was very interesting to hear opinions and we’ll start by reviewing them on first days of next year.About 7pm I finished interviewing and with the first group of party-goers we went into Bunker night club where the party was to take place. Of course, there were a lot of food and beverages, and DJ’s prepared a good set of music for us. When everyone came, I started with the official part. First, there were official speeches about what our company had done in 2006 – we’d grown from 50 to 80 people in staff, gotten remarkable financial results, did a lot with getting better compensation package for our employees. Then I went on to celebrate our best employees. We decided to choose 15 people in different categories, mostly those who did a lot of hidden work all the year round and give them publicly (which really matters) a certificate for good bonus. Here are our heroes:

• PM’s: Michael Telsov, Andrey Turchaev, Grigory Dmitrenko
• Team leaders: Valery Makarenko (PHP), Sergey Parfenenok (Unix), Alexey Malinovsky (Desktop)
• Seniors: Alexey Kupershtokh aka Wikked (PHP), Anatoly Ivanov (Java), Andrey Smetanin (ASP.net)
• Developers: Alexey Tanaseichuk (C++/.net), Dmitry Reshetov (ASP.net), Alexander Tioumentsev (C++/Unix/MacOs)
• Best in QA: Michael Rusaleev
• Design: Irina Zelenkova
• New technologies: Michail Imbro (Ruby on Rails)

After praising the celebrities, we remembered the best of 2006 with more unofficial events:

• Our HR Elena Sitnikova sang a special song for our CFO;
• The corporate movie (aka an edited cartoon ‘Winter in Prostokvashino’) was traditionally greeted with cheers;
• Our developers’ hard rock band ‘Ungraved’ made a great electric guitar show;
• “CanCan” dance by our beautiful girls (
  Lena, Vika, Irina and Olya) couldn’t help attracting everybody’s attention (see the picture below)
• Several funny contests and even men’s strip-tease on the bar table heated the already warm atmosphere;
• Many-many other dances, beverages and good food inspired everybody with joy and fun.

I suppose we did a great New Year Party in the successful 2006! I wish everyone Happy New Year and Merry Christmas! We’ll get back to work on 8 January 2007, but I’ll keep posting to the blog during holidays!
Me congratulating everyone during the official part.

Speech by Yuriy Bannov.

Just chilling

A dance by our girls.