After almost 5 months of work, it’s time to repay my beloved Javarush... I’m 32 years old, and until May 2014 I had no experience in programming or in the IT field at all. Economic education. Now I work as a Junior Java Developer in a large international company in Kyiv. So YES - if you work hard and study every day from morning until you have a headache, you can find a job even in these wonderful times when a crowd of 500 people flocks to a Java Jun vacancy. I studied mainly in Javarush until I got into a real project, at that time all problems up to level 22 and almost all large ones (up to 27, apparently) were solved. In addition to Javarush and books that can be found in any list for beginners, the course on coursera on algorithms in Java (taught by Sedgwick and someone else) was very helpful, although I don’t use this knowledge in my work now, but it really helped me understand the programming process in general and improve technical skills. The employment process took about 5 months and in the end I was so desperate to find a job that I simply registered with Odesk (now an upwork) and started taking orders for core java. There are few of them there and you can’t earn much from it, but already the second or third satisfied client offered me permanent remote work in the future. The worst thing about work was, of course, the first day after which I simply lost the idea that it would be nice to describe my success story here, and I put it off until the probationary period ended. The company uses its own framework and when the team lead came to train us, I was very afraid of being embarrassed that I didn’t know something or God forbid I couldn’t build something in Maven, etc., in general, the usual fears. The first couple of weeks until I got used to it were scary, but then I was able to relax a little and the work began to bring me pleasure in addition to money. Before I got the job, I was racking my brains about what programmers do at work :-) It turned out to be mostly catching bugs, of course. My company is engaged in online gambling, and I, in particular, develop games for mobile phones. Games are written in Java and then their own framework translates them into HTML and other platforms. The first week we were given tasks to add some button to an existing game (it was not committed anywhere), and in the second week they gave us each a game to develop, but with normal deadlines and there was time to figure everything out. At the moment I have 4 games hanging on me + sometimes they can throw someone else’s games on me during the holidays. The game is not being developed from scratch, there is a certain common feature that I am already adding to the game, then there are a bunch of procedures for testing and all sorts of previews, and all the bugs and improvements naturally come to me. This is roughly what my life as a developer is like now. Well, the advice of the day for everyone who is desperate to find a job: never stop learning and practicing, and sooner or later your level will be higher than other applicants. My last interview ended with question 3, after which I received an offer. PS
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