How to Leave IT and Become a Factory Mechanic: My Attempt at Downshifting [Part 2 of 5]

This is the second part of a series about my attempt at downshifting — leaving IT to try a completely different kind of work. If you missed the first part, I previously described how I tried to get hired as a street sweeper and failed. This time, the story involves two interviews: one at the retail company YevroTorg, and one at an actual factory.

The Call from the Factory

I was walking to the YevroTorg office for a courier position interview when my phone rang. It was the factory — the one I had applied to earlier for a driver position. They wanted me to come in for an interview. Everything was happening too fast and too aggressively, like a high-pressure sales pitch. Despite my initial hesitation, I agreed to schedule a visit.

The YevroTorg Interview

At YevroTorg, the HR process was a study in bureaucratic redundancy. I was asked to fill out a paper questionnaire by hand — writing down the exact same information that was already in my electronic resume, which they had in front of them. Name, address, education, work experience — all of it, again, on paper.

But the real highlight was the bathroom situation. The restroom in the HR department was accessible only to employees with a badge. As a job applicant — someone they had invited to come in — I was apparently not entitled to use the facilities. A small detail, perhaps, but one that says a lot about how a company views the people who might work for it.

The interview itself was unremarkable. Standard questions, standard answers. I left without strong feelings in either direction.

The Factory Interview

The factory visit was a different experience entirely. The process was more organized, and the people seemed genuinely interested in my background — not just my resume, but my actual hands-on skills.

I had come prepared. When the conversation turned to mechanical knowledge, I reached into my pocket and pulled out a speedometer drive gear from a ZIL-131 truck. It was partly a joke and partly a demonstration — I wanted to show that my interest in machinery was not theoretical. It seemed to work. The interviewers were impressed, or at least amused.

The position they offered was not the driver role I had originally applied for. Instead, they wanted me as a "mechanic MSR OTK" — essentially a mechanic in the technical quality control department. The salary was 1,200 Belarusian rubles, which is approximately 400 US dollars per month.

The Economics of Living in Belarus

To put that salary in context: heating gas for a private house in winter costs around 200 rubles per month. A family of six eating at McDonald's costs about the same. So 1,200 rubles is not a fortune, but it is a livable wage in this part of the world — especially if you are not trying to maintain an IT professional's lifestyle.

What mattered to me more than the money were three things: movement, development, and usefulness. These were my criteria for choosing work, and the factory job seemed to offer all three in ways that a courier position never could.

The Bureaucratic Obstacle

Despite getting approval from both the factory director and the chief engineer, my hiring ran into an unexpected complication. Being born in the USSR, it turns out, does not automatically grant you the right to work in certain positions in Belarus. The HR department needed to verify with the relevant authorities whether they could hire a "foreign specialist" for this role.

This was not a rejection — just a delay. But it meant that the straightforward path from interview to employment suddenly had a bureaucratic detour that neither I nor the factory management had fully anticipated.

Observations on Factory Life

The article concludes with a small observation about the state of the bathroom in the factory's administrative building — a puzzle of missing items that I will leave as an exercise for the reader's imagination. Let's just say that the contrast between corporate HR departments and factory administrative buildings is educational in ways that go beyond what any job description can convey.

What's Next

In the next installment, I will describe my visit to the relevant government authorities and the medical examination process required for factory employment in Belarus. The bureaucratic adventure continues.