Search/ads and ride/delivery services. As you may know Yandex has very advanced SDC system which was used(SDC robots) by Grubhub in Arizona University. They have delivery services in London/Paris and taxi services in Insrael and couple European countries.
As for the Russia I found news(in Russian) that McDonalds was huge part of orders in delivery service. Ads system fully broken because of Google suspension. Without concurents average prices will rise exponentially. Small business will not be able to buy ads and will closed in near feature.
> how much does language matter in job satisfaction?
I think it depends. I hate JavaScript and Python. My coworkers don't care about language. They are working on the product, the goal is a fully functional service with a huge DAU. I can't complete product-specific tasks. I had been writing low-level software for networks, Linux kernel patches, eBPF helpers/tracers and now I'm working on hardware virtualization. In my free time, I'm prototyping devices on my FPGAs. It's really interesting. I can't imagine that I will drop my current job and will start cooking or guiding.
There is one more reason. When you write something that works in a loop, e.g. web server, exceptions are a huge potential issue. I was working on a C++ project with a very complex state machine. One day our service started using all 128 CPU cores just for stack unwinding. It was an ordinary exception in 3thrd party library raised on every request in the loop. We have tried to make a lot of optimisations in different unwind libraries. But it was far away from the performance of a simple Optional-like errors container as a return value. Exceptions are really Zero-cost if they occur only once when application should be terminated.
> Group of managers wanted to choose Oracle based technology for this that would further entrench their team and they argumented they can do it faster and cheaper than the development team.
That's true. Most Open Source solutions don't work on huge workloads. You can read about Hadoop at Facebook or MySQL. They fully rewrote MySQL engine and partially Hadoop. Oracle solutions work well on huge workloads.
This company is not a software developer. The software department is just another team inside the company. The first goal of any non-software company is to reduce costs for IT infrastructure and development. It's not Google or Facebook where software development is a key factor of company capitalization.
> Obviously, they were not interested in improving the product but in grabbing power, budget and control of the development process. Also they needed to score some points to show they accomplished something during calendar year.
Or just do their job: provides a reliable service for storing data. The main goal of the DB/SysAdmin department is to show 99.99% uptime. The software department could not guarantee this uptime. Of course, if all these software developers are good SRE that's another situation. But I'm sure no one has experience of supporting huge systems for years.
> So my actions angered both managers of database operations as well as development teams.
If you really want to change something it will be better to make a virtual team from both departments and discuss all pitfalls from both teams. Maybe you are solving non-existent problem.
I'm working in a company with 20+ years of the legacy code base. We have a custom search engine fully optimized for our purposes. Decades were spent writing this code. It supports all the newest Linux kernel technologies. The codebase is really good. But every year a new inter tries to show that open source solutions are more reliable and faster. They don't try to write code in 1 hr of course. They spend 10 days on average to show proof of concept that is really fast for benchmarking, but it fails when we try to load testing data. I don't know why people think that nobody checked other solutions before them.
As for the Russia I found news(in Russian) that McDonalds was huge part of orders in delivery service. Ads system fully broken because of Google suspension. Without concurents average prices will rise exponentially. Small business will not be able to buy ads and will closed in near feature.