Danila Karapsin, Member of ICEF Master’s Class 2025, Developer Analyst at Yandex: ‘This World Will Always Need People Who Can Adequately Answer “Why”’
— Danila, why financial analytics and how did ICEF contribute to your career choice? If you were to revise your choice of master’s, would it be ICEF?
I got analyst experience long before starting my master’s. A native of the great city of Kurgan, I came to Moscow to try a variety of side jobs until I landed an internship at Sber Global Markets Department. I was a 4th-year finance student of Financial University at the time and, honestly, had only a vague idea of what analyst job was about. My choice was in some sense accidental, but it was a happy accident: I fell into a great job and decided to go on with it. Why? Because my every day of work brings puzzles. I start solving them and it is difficult to stop.
The internship completed, I joined Sber and worked for two more years before deciding to do a master’s as what I thought would boost my career prospects even faster. That’s how I entered ICEF. It was the right choice. If it were the year 2023 and I were to revise my choice, it would definitely be ICEF.
— How did you find a permanent job after your master's and did you land it quickly?
I started thinking about a job change soon after I entered my second year of ICEF. Even though Y2 course load remained as high as Y1’s, I started to prioritise interview training. I posted my resume in early December with a view to start a new job as early as January. I had many exciting offers coming in, but, upon careful consideration of my options, I chose Yandex.
— You know a good choice when you see one, Danila. What are your current responsibilities? What is your typical day like?
I am on Yandex Pay analyst team. Every day brings new ideas as to how to make our app even better and more convenient for users. You can never tell immediately which of them will work and which won’t, just like you never know whether adding a button will boost user experience or reduce turnover. To adequately assess the effect of any innovation, you need to do an A/B test (a method to compare two versions of something to see which performs better – Ed.). Designing this test (which involves determining the sample size and test duration) is exactly what I do in my role as analyst.
Another important line of my work is dashboard development. It involves building interactive reports to allow dynamic monitoring of key indicators and analysis of how and why they change.
Improvements don’t bloom out of thin air. Some of them build on previous A/B tests, some rely on dashboard monitoring, some draw on research outcomes. Most of my tasks come down to finding the answer to why user behavior is the way it is.
A typical analyst day involves either working on some of the above tasks or switching between them, while handling a multitude of smaller subtasks such as delivering data from one place to another and setting up hundreds of thousands of metrics for the A/B tests. I could write a book about it and still miss something.
— Which of your skills or knowledge from ICEF do you rely on most in your daily work? Can you name any courses or teachers that provided a valuable input to your becoming a professional?
The knowledge I rely on most comes from the courses that teach probability theory, econometrics, and machine learning. And no wonder, since the job of an analyst, at its simplest, is about identifying cause-and-effect relationships and making forecasts.
Also, particularly enriching was the introductory course on probability theory and mathematical statistics by Alexander Zasorin, time series and financial econometrics lectures by Sofya Budanova, and Fabian Slonimchik’s mind-blowing course on machine learning.
— How confident are you in your workplace compared to colleagues with degrees from other schools? Did you ever feel your ICEF skillsets were making you stand out?
There’s this old story that 90% of devs don’t know binary search. It might be true. Indeed, 90% of analysts seems to have only a superficial understanding of how t-test works (a tool for determining if the difference between the averages of two groups is statistically significant – Ed.), although it doesn’t mean they are doing their job wrong. I know it from experience, I was in their ranks before starting my master’s.
The truth is that superficiality can severely limit one’s arsenal of tools for solving problems. And it’s not even a problem of t-test itself. It’s about lacking the understanding of the basic concepts that serve as building blocks for complex concepts. As a result, a task of, say, predicting time series behaviour starts to look like running around in circles. You put your model to a data test to only realize it doesn’t work and that you have to start from the beginning.
But, this problem fades away after the two-year-long high-level econometrics course. Even when faced with something new, something that I wasn’t trained for, my knowledge proves sufficient to enable me to quickly figure things out. In this sense, ICEF does give a serious advantage.
— Do you set yourself 3-5 year career goals? What seems to be important for your growth now and where do you see yourself in ten years?
We are living in a time when planning even a year ahead feels tough. No one knows what’s going to happen in ten years, but one thing is for sure: the tools used in analytics are bound to change. The very name of the job is likely to change, too. But, this world always need people who can adequately answer ‘Why?’. This ability will stay relevant as long as humanity exists.
This trend is what I keep in mind when planning my career progress. I’m going to keep on working on my core competencies to be a better problem-solver so that my experience can lead to product improvement and benefit my colleagues.
— What would you recommend to ICEF’s current class of master’s students who are about to embark on a career choice? What should they focus on to be competitive?
I think the most important thing is to never stop learning. Just a couple of years ago I was completely new to most what I now do in my workplace every day. Fortunately for us, this age of information offers everything needed for us to easily identify our career needs and fill our knowledge gaps.