Oleksiy Ivanovich Skrypnyk, who founded one of the oldest Ukrainian IT companies, ELEKS, passed away today. We remind you how he became a legend of Ukrainian IT and what he advised IT professionals to do.
dev.ua is republishing an excerpt from Oleksiy Skrypnyk’s extensive interview for DOU, which he gave in January 2022.
Oleksiy Ivanovich Skrypnyk, who founded one of the oldest Ukrainian IT companies, ELEKS, passed away today. We remind you how he became a legend of Ukrainian IT and what he advised IT professionals to do.
dev.ua is republishing an excerpt from Oleksiy Skrypnyk’s extensive interview for DOU, which he gave in January 2022.
Alexey Skrypnyk said that he started programming back in 1973 on large machines like the IBM System/360. First he programmed in BASIC, then in FORTRAN, ALGOL, and Pascal, until he settled on C++ and its variants. In the Soviet Union, he worked, among other things, on a project to model nuclear submarines.
«The idea of founding my own company belonged more to my wife. She was a little annoyed that I was working and earning a pittance. Even then, she had experience organizing household enterprises. My son had experience working in the energy sector. I saw that we were capable of solving problems related to this area», — said Oleksiy Skrypnyk about the founding of the ELEKS company in 1991.
Initially, the company looked for customers via the Internet and by the end of the 90s it already had orders in England and the USA. In the early 2000s, the ELEKS team visited the USA for the first time, and foreign customers came to Lviv. In 2001, the company received the status of Microsoft Certified Partner.
«Until about 2012, I served as the chief accountant and also took care of office renovation issues. At the same time, I managed to write a new version of the DAKAR program for Windows», — noted Oleksiy Skrypnyk.
According to Oleksiy Ivanovich, over the past 30 years, the people who have changed the most in the industry are the people who were then mostly researchers and solved more technical problems, and «did little with economic and financial problems».
«Today, an IT company solves various problems, both domestically and globally. Now we encounter digital products in everyday life. For example, „Diya“. Today I take out my mobile phone, show that I have a COVID certificate, and that’s it», — said Oleksiy Skrypnyk.
He didn’t see a problem in the fact that many people are attracted to IT primarily because of the high salaries. According to the ELEKS co-founder, this way someone could find their calling, which would bring not only money, but also satisfaction from work.
«Here’s one piece of advice — work, search, hope, and you will achieve results. My eldest grandson worked for a while at ELEKS after graduating from university, but wanted to be more independent. He created a small company for sewing upholstered furniture. But now he has a powerful IT company, which in some ways is even comparable to ELEKS»? — noted Oleksiy Ivanovich.
The main thing, according to him, is to find something «that is interesting and profitable,» because» in addition to curiosity, there is also well-being, family».
Let us recall that a month after the publication of this interview and a day before the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the son of Oleksiy Ivanovich Skrypnyk, who was also a co-founder of ELEKS, suddenly passed away.
