VILNIUS, Lithuania — Within the mobile game Airplane Chefs, the player is a flight attendant rushing to microwave as much food as possible and serve it, just as efficiently, on a industrial jet full of demanding passengers.
Attempting to find bugs on this game is the job of Inha Kushnir, a member of the standard assurance team at Nordcurrent, the Lithuanian company that created and markets Airplane Chefs and a handful of other titles. Sitting in front of a desktop computer in Nordcurrent’s surprisingly quiet Vilnius office, in a neighborhood that may be a jumble of glass corporate towers and residential housing, Ms. Kushnir spent a recent afternoon in search of programming flaws as her online avatar zapped pizzas and loaded them onto trolley carts. The work is absorbing, which makes it a great option to concentrate on something apart from why she’s in Vilnius and the way she came.
“At any time when I take into consideration work,” she said during a break, “I stop eager about what is occurring in Odesa.”
Until late February, Ms. Kushnir worked in Nordcurrent’s Odesa office. Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and she or he and her husband decided that it might be safer for her and the couple’s young daughter to depart. Ms. Kushnir’s husband, like nearly all Ukrainian men, stayed behind.
Now Ms. Kushnir is a component of Ukraine’s information technology diaspora, about 50,000 people, most of them residing in Poland, Germany, Spain, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands.
Before these staff relocated, they were a part of certainly one of Ukraine’s largest service exports, with $5 billion in annual revenue, representing about 4 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, the IT Ukraine Association says. The country has a really mobile pool of I.T. talent, nearly 300,000 people providing computer and coding services in fields like e-commerce, artificial intelligence, robotics, blockchain and so forth.
When the invasion began, Nordcurrent, like dozens of other firms, improvised an evacuation plan for workers who suddenly lived in a war zone. There are 250 people on Nordcurrent’s payroll, and nearly half were in Ukraine — 90 in Odesa and 30 in Dnipro.
For Nordcurrent, which was founded in 2002, recruiting from Ukraine was simply smart business. Staff there are likely to be proficient in English, the lingua franca of the corporate, and highly capable. (The country’s emphasis on science and tech education is a legacy of years within the Soviet Union.) The chance that Russia might in the future invade had been front of mind amongst Nordcurrent executives since 2014, when Russian troops annexed Crimea within the south of Ukraine. The threat was talked about so often that, paradoxically, it receded as a source of tension.
“We decided to disregard it,” said Victoria Trofimova, Nordcurrent’s Ukrainian-born chief executive and the one who cobbled together and oversaw the evacuation plan. “Even when there was discuss forces on the border of Ukraine, we decided to proceed as usual.”
That approach ended the morning of Feb. 24, when Ms. Trofimova hit the snooze button on her alarm clock a number of times before realizing the noise was coming from her phone. Her father was calling to say Russia had invaded Ukraine. She soon was in contact with Ukrainian employees, offering to assist them flee. Most desired to stay, but a number of dozen decided that the country was too dangerous for them, or their parents or their children.
Ms. Trofimova’s plan involved three bus drivers who made two trips, 4 days apart, in addition to calls to the Hungarian Consulate, a handful of volunteers bearing insulin for diabetics and, ultimately, the protected passage of 51 people, three dogs and one guinea pig.
Amongst the most important challenges was finding a bus because most had already been booked. After calling around, Ms. Trofimova found an operator in Romania willing to choose up her employees in Odesa.
“Then I fearful about passports, because not loads of Ukrainians have passports because they’ve never traveled in a foreign country,” she said. “And we were getting conflicting details about whether people needed Covid vaccine certificates.”
They didn’t, it turned out. And the six-hour wait on the Romanian border was relatively temporary, courtesy of Ms. Trofimova’s decision to direct the bus to the tiny town of Isaccea, a somewhat obscure crossing point.
Nordcurrent employees say adjusting to their latest setting has been relatively smooth, each because Vilnius is an easily navigated city and since the corporate is a family business that has done its best to embrace them. Ms. Trofimova founded it along along with her husband, Michail Trofimov, and his brother Sergej, and their creations lean toward the whimsical, starting with their first title, Santa Claus Saves the Earth. Every month about 12 million people play Nordcurrent games, that are free to download and play. Revenue, which amounted to $64 million last 12 months, is earned when add-ons are purchased, value more highly cooking equipment in Airplane Chefs.
The headquarters have a really un-corporate atmosphere. An aging cat sleeps on the sofa at the doorway of the office, which is on the third floor of a spiffy latest constructing next to a cinema and above a coffee shop. Meeting rooms are named for the corporate’s games, like Murder within the Alps and Cooking Fever. For distractions, there are table tennis and foosball in a snack room.
Like Odesa, Vilnius is a mixture of the grand old buildings and Soviet architecture, and the country, which was the primary of the 15 Soviet republics to declare its independence, has been welcoming to Ukrainians. A law that requires proficiency in Lithuanian for certain jobs was suspended to assist the 50,000 refugees who’ve arrived here.
Within the months for the reason that fighting began, the exit of Ukrainian tech staff has taken all of them over Europe and the remainder of the world. Some are planning to return home; others hope to remain put. For 2 Ukrainians who left a number of years ago and have settled in Berlin, the invasion sparked an idea. Nikita Overchyk and Ivan Kychatyi created UA Talents, an internet portal for employers in the hunt for Ukrainian I.T. staff. It’s principally a matchmaking site, and it currently has 15,000 job postings.
The location’s founders say anyone from Ukraine who joins them in Germany should brace themselves for culture shock.
“This place is hugely bureaucratic,” Mr. Overchyk said. “There are loads of rules, and also you get three to 4 pieces of mail every week that it’s essential to reply to. No one in Ukraine communicates by mail.”
Mr. Kychatyi agreed.
“A whole lot of things just take too long,” he said. “Like getting web service at home. That took a month. In Ukraine, that takes two days.”
There’s a premium on beautiful design and ease of use in Ukraine that’s missing from many web sites in Germany, the boys said. In Ukraine, if an aging site needs an update, no one is sweating about protocol or rules.
“We’ve no process,” Mr. Overchyk said. “We just get stuff done. That’s the mentality that Ukrainians are going to bring wherever they go. ‘We want this to occur. Help me make it occur.’”
This get-it-done ethos is reflected in lots of the stories told by Nordcurrent employees who scrambled out of Ukraine. Nastya Dahno was an artist in the corporate’s Dnipro office and met the second bus within the Polish town of Lodz. First, she needed to travel by train from Dnipro to Lviv, a visit that, within the chaos of those first days of war, took 36 hours as a substitute of the same old 12. It was a sleeper train, with bunk beds that were used like benches, seating 4 or five people.
The space was crammed, the doors were locked, the shades were drawn and blankets were draped over the shades. The thought was to cut back the sunshine emitted by the train and limit the prospect of being spotted by Russians, and to cut back the impact of imploding glass if the train was attacked. Everybody was instructed to maintain quiet, especially when the train stopped at a platform.
The scariest moment occurred about 10 hours into the trip, at the hours of darkness, when the silence of a stop was shattered by a person pounding on the door, screaming, “Let me in!”
“We had no idea who was on the opposite side of that door,” Ms. Dahno said (and she or he never discovered, because it happened). “We thought it might be a criminal or a Russian soldier. No one spoke. We were just silent.”
Most of Nordcurrent’s employees, like most Ukrainians, stayed in Ukraine. Considered one of them is Tatyana Margolina, the corporate’s office director in Dnipro. Over a video chat, she recalled that President Volodymyr Zelensky had said early on that if everyone emigrated, the economy would collapse. A neighborhood government official then offered a gender-specific suggestion about the best way to spend some money.
Guys, go to the gym. Ladies, get your nails done.
“Nail salons have develop into a spot for therapy,” Ms. Margolina said. “The lady around here who does nails has also taken some courses in psychology. So her salon isn’t just a spot to repair your nails. It’s a spot to speak.”
As Ms. Margolina keeps the Dnipro office running, there’s a latest and unnerving dimension to her job: the sound of explosions. She hears them often, though even silence in a war is preoccupying — for those in Vilnius, too.
Not way back, Ms. Kushnir was on the phone along with her husband when he heard bombs landing and said he needed to hold up and sprint to a shelter. Inside hours, she read that three people had died in a house near a playground where Ms. Kushnir often took her daughter. That they had perished, she quickly realized, within the attack that compelled her husband to hold up.
“I can’t understand this war,” Ms. Kushnir said, removing her glasses to dab tears on her cheeks. “Our lives were ruined, broken, and I don’t know why.”
