Dear friends! Finally, the long-awaited moment has come when I share my difficult story. I hope it wasn't too big and tedious. If so, then excuse me - it’s painful!)) Prologue I dreamed of becoming a programmer since childhood. My first language was Turbo Pascal. Having bought the book and read about three hundred pages, I wrote several simple programs, and that’s where it all ended. The book moved to the shelf until next time. The next time came about a couple of years later, but with the same success. Having reached some complex topics (I don’t remember what scared me), it was decided that programming was not for me. And I decided to enroll in economics. After all, it’s prestigious, the prospects seem to be quite good, and in general the main thing in the job is the salary! That's roughly what I thought then. 6 years at the university passed under the motto “just to pass the exam”, because... I never developed any interest in economics; on the contrary, as a student, I was always drawn to programming, and I made several attempts to learn a language again. I took up Delphi, PHP, C++, but in the end everything developed according to the same scenario: I got bored with everything, something didn’t work out again and I gave up. After graduating from university, I went to work in a bank. At first I liked everything, I built a career, grew in salary, and was praised. But over time, everything became dull and I began to periodically jump into different positions within the bank, thinking that probably the matter was in a specific direction. However, after a year or two, I finally realized that this could no longer continue, and decided to quit with the understanding that I would look for my next job in the IT field, and yes, of course, as a programmer! Fortunately, at that time I created a good financial cushion for myself so as not to sit on my parents’ necks. And so, I took up C#! I downloaded Schildt’s book and, as a result, this time I mastered as many as 500 pages!)) I consolidated my previous knowledge, plus I finally understood OOP. This took about 4 months. Then I started looking for a job. I went to 2 interviews, where I was very confused... sorry, I screwed up, because... I had no study projects done at all, almost no practice, and there were obvious gaps in knowledge. That's when I realized that just knowing a specific language is not enough. It was necessary to understand the related technologies and have at least some experience, even non-commercial. But I no longer had the enthusiasm and strength left for all this, there was only irritation that again nothing worked out for me. The result was sad: I was left without a job, half of my savings (I drank away), nerves, and most importantly, without the reason for which everything was started. It was decided to return to the bank in disgrace; fortunately, I maintained normal relations with my superiors. Do I need to say what my state of mind was? However, this time I had a not particularly stressful maternity position awaiting me, in which I lasted about a year, after which I was forced to switch to work with paperwork that I hated. And then it started again! After half a year, I again hated my job, where I had to sit for 10-11 hours. At that time, I already knew about JavaRush from my younger brother and decided to try it out of curiosity to see what it was—game-based learning. JavaRush. The first 15 levels were relatively easy - my knowledge base accumulated over previous attempts helped me. I studied for an hour or two a day in the evenings after work. On weekends I sat as much as possible. As a result, in about two months I reached level 18, but I realized that I needed to spend more time on training. The tasks became more difficult, the material became completely unfamiliar, it was necessary to Google, etc. But I didn’t have any more free time, sometimes you came home from work, turned on the computer and realized that your brain just couldn’t cook and you fell on the bed. Now my work began to stress me doubly, because I no longer just didn’t like it, but it got in the way and took up precious time! And I decided to quit again :) when I brought the application to the personnel department, the personnel officer could hardly contain her laughter, my family decided that I was completely crazy, my friends were also skeptical. But I didn’t care anymore. The desire was so strong inside! And away we go, I sat studying every day from morning until I had a headache, sometimes for 12 hours (but not every day, otherwise there would be nothing the next day). Everything is as usual: I read, solved, asked and googled. I didn’t move to the next level until I secured the current one. If something remained unclear, I was sure to look for additional material. By the end of April, I reached level 31 with 2 unsolved problems and decided to participate in a real project. Or rather, I decided earlier when I bought a subscription :) A real project. The test task was very difficult. Oh, how I suffered and cursed!! The first 2-3 days there was panic, I didn’t even understand which way to approach it, due to the fact that there was nothing like that in JR’s course! Well, for example, Tomcat, JSP, Spring, Hibernate, etc. I had to google everything from scratch. As a result, after 2 weeks everything was ready and sent for verification. While I was waiting for the internship to start, I reached level 35 and stopped there. I won’t say that I’m delighted with the project, but overall it’s ok. One solution to the test task gave me an understanding of where I am and where approximately I need to be in order to become a Junior. Well, participation itself, of course, greatly added knowledge to the head, which was very helpful during interviews. In the project itself, I did not like how the presentation of the material was organized. Firstly, this is not an online broadcast as I thought, but a recording of one of the past internships in webinar mode, where questions along the way, as you can understand, cannot be asked. Only in Slack, where communication takes place. To be fair, I will say that they will always help and guide you, if not the presenter, then other participants. Secondly, the video in 90% of cases is not training on a specific topic, but simply visual instructions on how to apply changes to the project, which is also not bad, but I would like some overview mini-tutorials. And for each lesson there are a lot of links and videos (which is also good!). You need to digest all this and do your homework. However, it was difficult for me to assimilate all the information - there was too much new. But I will definitely return to participate someday to consolidate my knowledge. (again free, as far as I understand). After a month and a half of internship, I really wanted to get a job, because... Studying non-stop has already become quite boring. Here is a very important point: no matter how much enthusiasm and vigor you have, one day it will dry up! Make the most of it while it lasts. Job search. I started looking for work from level 20, although in passive mode (I just updated my resume) because... I didn’t feel like I was ready to go to interviews yet. I also decided to write some simple application (as far as my level 20 knowledge allowed me at that time) so that there would be at least some code examples in my resume. The choice fell on console multi-threaded chat with the server. I wrote it, uploaded it to GitHub and continued learning further, hoping that someone would call me and invite me for an interview. A month passed and not a single call. I began sending out my resume on my own to places where I more or less met the requirements. The big problem was that there were very few vacancies for Java developers in my city (Volgograd). On average, maybe about 8-10 per month. And as you understand, people with experience were more expected there than those who worked in a bank for almost 5 years, and then suddenly decided to become a programmer at the age of 28, without a technical education. For reference: Volgograd takes an honorable last place in terms of living standards in the Top 38 cities of Russia. But I did not despair and continued my training, simultaneously updating my resume as my skills grew. Added new projects. July came, half of the internship was completed, and I still hadn’t received a single offer. As I wrote above, the enthusiasm and strength for learning had already begun to fade and I really became scared - was it really a failure again?! But there was nowhere to retreat. And I decided that the only way out was to move to another city. Where to go? I can’t sit on my ass for another 4 months waiting for a miracle. I was choosing between St. Petersburg and Moscow. Over the course of a couple of weeks, I completed about 2-3 interviews via Skype and successfully completed a couple of test tasks. They asked mainly about the core; once the interview was in English. I myself refused one option, because... I read a lot of negative reviews about the company on the Internet. Two more proposals were left because... took stronger local candidates. As a result, there was only one invitation left for an in-person interview in Moscow, where I went. I was literally tortured during this interview. I answered well about 60-70% of the questions, 20% more or less, and I couldn’t say anything about the rest, so I solved a few more tests on a piece of paper. The next day, while I was waiting for the result, I updated my resume again. An hour later they called me back and invited me for another interview. Everything went fine. There weren't very many questions. It was clear that hiring new employees in this company is rare, and this is a good sign) The main thing that played in my favor was my sparkling eyes, which compensated for the gaps in experience and education. An hour later we said goodbye, and in the morning they called me back and told me to come with documents!! At work. I ended up on a huge project consisting of about 30 modules with the following technology stack: EJB, JSF(Primefaces), Hibernate, JPA, Oracle, Websphere Application Server, JMS(Websphere MQ), Maven. And all this stuff is running on several servers running Linux. Project management is carried out in Redmine, development is carried out in IDEA, and git is used as the CCS. At first it was very difficult and scary, it seemed overwhelming. After a couple of weeks I understood the project more or less. A month later I was already uploading small hotfixes and simple features. If something is not clear, colleagues will always help. There is no shame in asking someone for help. Each person is stronger in some ways and weaker in others, you just need to learn from each other. I really like the work! (yes, finally:)) Now I am no longer depressed on Sunday evenings) All the effort expended was 146% worth it. Yes, I still have a lot to learn and it will take more than one year, but now I know for sure that everything will work out ;) A little feedback. What I didn’t like about the course: minor typos, mistakes, inaccuracies in task conditions that make life difficult. Once I remember finding an obvious mistake in a lecture about regular expressions. So, I went to write about this on info and discovered that someone had already pointed this out to me and 2 years have passed since then!! And nothing was changed. It was things like this that were a little upsetting. Otherwise, of course, the impressions are only positive. The most important advantage of this resource is that I was sure almost from the very beginning that everything would work out! Maybe other success stories had this effect on me, I don’t know. In any case, motivation is very, very important. Thanks JR for this. *** I sincerely wish everyone patience and strength to realize their dreams! And don't think about giving up! As soon as you get into your head the idea that you won’t succeed, know that this is the end! A little philosophy. In conclusion, I wanted to share with you a couple of quotes that helped me in difficult times: 1. “Whether you think you can do something or think you can’t do it, you are right in both cases” - Henry Ford. 2. “The man who could move a mountain began by dragging small pebbles from place to place.” Chinese proverb.
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