Greetings, ladies and gentlemen! =) It so happened that I was recently preparing for an interview and needed to prepare for English. This topic is as important as programming itself, because... all documentation is in English, all the latest is in English, the coolest books are in English. Yes, you will say that there are translations of books into Russian... This is true, but it is also true that most translations are worthless and do not convey the essence of the issue. And sometimes they are completely misleading. And it so happened that when responding to comments on my blog about the success story , and in the article itself, I talked about how important this is and decided that it would be necessary to put it in a separate post. The reality is that in many companies the interview takes place in three stages:
Communication with HR. At this stage they tell about the company, how cool they are, what they do, etc. and at the same time they look at how adequate the interlocutor is. If he is inadequate, then there will be no further communication.
Interview in English... This is where they will look at how honestly you admitted in your resume, what your level is. And realistically, if you remain silent and don’t answer anything, then at this stage the interview will end for you... Here there will be communication not on the topic of programming, but simply in a free topic or often “Tell me about yourself” .
If you have successfully completed the first two stages, congratulations, you will be able to talk with a technical specialist about your professional literacy.
Based on this list, I want to talk about how I did it, what conclusions and examples. I went to my first interview and somehow didn’t think about the topic of English... quote from my article: After talking with HR, they called me an English teacher, with whom I “talked.” I was not at all prepared for this moment and it turned out that I listened more than I spoke. And on the topic, tell me about yourself, I mumbled something, but nothing special. And after that, I learned an important lesson that you need to prepare for English just as much as for technical issues. In reality, you can’t repeat or study all the grammar in a short period of time, but you can make a small cheat sheet for yourself. Let it consist of simple sentences, let it not be thorough, but it WILL BE! and you will have something to say. With these thoughts, I composed my first story, which I clearly learned, maybe not verbatim, but close to the text: Hello. My name is Roman. I AM studiNG AT SomeUniversity. I have HAD an experience in android development. I've been working with freelansers team since January. I have strong communication skills and I am fast learning person. I have many hobbies, for example i play guitar and love camping. My grandfather father and I are bee-keepers. Really. I am not afraid when bees are stinging me. I know what need to do if you want to get some honey from bee-hive. I like sport, thats why i go to the gym EVERY OTHER DAY day. I like this. Also i do not drink alcohol and smoke the cigarettes. Small, but already something. Where it is highlighted in capital letters, this was edited for me by my wife, who read it. Her English is better than mine. At another interview I used this cheat sheet and everything was fine, they listened to me and nodded. But I didn’t think about the fact that they would still ask me questions and it would be nice if I could answer them. This is where I screwed up. Again he began to mumble and speak little and slowly. From this interview, I learned that I needed to think about the answers to the expected questions before my story... And so I smoothly approached what I was preparing a couple of days ago. During this time, I got a little better at English (I think) and got this template: Hello! My name is Roman. I live in SomeCity. I'm working as Java developer in IT company. On this job, I'm developing microservices structure. For dependency injection, I'm using Guice(pronounced as juice). It's lightweight framework from Google. Also, we're using Jersey. As build tools, we are using Gradle. Gradle it's the most powerful of all those tools. Because it has life circle as Maven and it has tasks as Ant. And all of this you can combine as you want on Groovy. it's mean that you do all things in groovy script. Also, I'm making different tests. I'm using JUnit 4, Mockito and JMeter. For database we use MongoDB where we store metadata for our application. I love sports, that's why 3 times per week I go to the gym. Also, I like to play volleyball, badminton and sometimes I can go to play soccer with my old friends, but it doesn't mean that I'm good in it. Also, I have many hobbies, for example, I play the guitar. Every summer I go to the forest near Chuguev on the Severskiy Donec beach. It's place called “Figurovka”. Every night we sit around the bonfire and sing songs while I play the guitar. It's about the night, as for day we usually play volleyball and badminton. you know badminton is more difficult than volleyball because while you play volleyball you can rest instead of badminton when you need to move all the time if you want to win. When I speak about badminton I mean professional badminton when you have badminton court and rules. Next, it is a hobby and a family business. My father and I are beekeepers. We know how to get honey :D. We have about 40 colonies of bees. It's normal for us. I love it because working with bees it's very healthy for the body. They are very smart. of course, we sell honey. Bees produce many commodities. For example honey, beeswax, pollen, propolis and else. Also, we produce Medovucha. It's lightweight alcohol beverage, which does not contain ethanol. Also, we provide pollination services. Here I tried to do as much as possible so that some of it could be remembered and told, and some would already be answers to expected questions. For example, about beekeeping, I specially learned all the terms in English so that I could carry on a conversation if they were interested.
English for IT
And of course I want to add a few words from my experience about how to develop your English in IT. This is only my personal opinion and it in no way pretends to be the ultimate truth, but if someone brings out something interesting for themselves, I will be only happy. There are even courses in my city that provide English specifically for IT, but it seems to me that this is a bad idea. It is better to learn English in good courses or through video lessons, but the words that need to be used in professional activities can be taken from books in English. Yes, that’s right, now I’m reading the book “The Linux CommandLine” in English and got myself a notebook in which I write down words unknown to me that they use. And it really works, it helps me. Finally, I would like to wish all Javarash residents good luck in upgrading their skills, successful job search and intermediate English! Anyone who liked the article, put “+”, write in the comments, let’s have a dialogue. See also my other articles:
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