Employment history of an almost thirty-year-old family man

Dossier

• Who: axmexa
• Worked as: advertising specialist
• Age at start of training: 29
• Place of residence: Chelyabinsk, Russia
• First job as a programmer: 9 months after starting my studies
• Original success story

Initial data: 29 years old, married, son 3 years old, another flower of life on the way. Mortgage. Worked as an advertising specialist for the last 4 years. In terms of money there was everything in order, but this work was not at all what I dreamed of doing. All my life I was drawn to the IT field, but somehow fate turned me away from it.

Studies

At the beginning of 2014, I firmly decided to change my profession in six months and signed up for JavaRush. And so, starting from September 15, I am a Java Junior Developer ! I’ll be honest: I went beyond the “planned” six months due to a large number of personal matters. I devoted 2-3 hours a day to training , in the evening after work. It happened that I didn’t sit down to program for a whole week, and I just felt like the skill was being lost.

Interview

At the time of looking for a job in my city ( Chelyabinsk ) there were only 3 vacancies , and only one place required a Junior , the other two simply needed a Java programmer (that is, not a beginner). All three companies immediately rejected me. However, a week later I called them all again and they scheduled an interview. At this interview, in fact, they were assessing more not on the depth of my knowledge, but on the person. That is, it was important to them whether I was ready to learn, whether I was smart. From programming, they mainly asked general questions about OOP , and what technologies I am familiar with. They also gave me a problem to solve on the Fibonacci series . It was necessary to write code for a method whose arguments are given the first two elements of a series and the number of any element, the method returns this element. In general, it’s not difficult. Perhaps because in my resume I wrote only those technologies that I was familiar with, without embellishments ( Java Core , HTTP , SVN and something else), respectively, the IT reviewers did not ask me questions about JBoss or Maven , which I did not mention. And - yes - they hired me! I will also mention that in another company where I sent my resume, they gave me two test tasks. They were on understanding the basics of Java (collections in particular).

Job

At the moment ( September 22, 2014 ) I have been working for a week. While I’m delving into the project: I’m watching how the Frontend is being sculpted. What will be assigned will be seen. I also want to say that doing your own thing is cool, you should strive for it. Set a goal and go for it. A little parting word: the sooner you realize what you want to do in life ( after all, work is almost 1/3 of life ), the easier it is to take this path. Then it will be much harder.

PS Once again about studying

1. At the time of employment I reached level 21 .
2. Golovach’s courses helped a lot, but they take a lot of time, so I recommend watching only what you would like to be chewed on. I downloaded Golovach’s courses onto my player and watched them mostly on the way to work.
3. Gain knowledge of SVN ( GIT ) and SQL , at least at a basic level. When you are asked in an interview, you will have something to answer.
4. Once again - DON'T GIVE UP!

One year later

After working as a programmer for some time, I realized that they hired me there primarily due to my good theoretical preparation: they needed a person who was smart and would not break anything in the project. Three months later, I began to suspect that it would not be possible to work fully in a friendly team and make the most of my potential and knowledge at my current place of work. The company was a low-cost airline, worked with government contracts at the municipal level, but not everything was going smoothly financially. And the team consisted only of team-lead, me and one more developer. I couldn’t count on clear answers to my questions within the team. In general, I began to look for a new job, already for the position of Middle/Senior. I started brushing up on my theory and preparing for interviews. I’ll say right away that, after getting a job, I abandoned JavaRush (I stopped at level 26), which I highly recommend that you, reader, do not do in the future, unless you want to further improve your professional level. There were few suitable vacancies in the city, only 4-5 offers. As a result, three companies turned me down, which made me very demoralized. So I continued my studies, and at some point I decided to move to another city, namely Sochi. Since Java programmers are not in demand in Sochi (like many other specialists), I began to look for remote work. Fortunately, there were many more such proposals. I started going through interviews and doing tests again. I didn’t even consider some of them because I was not familiar with the required technologies. Two months of searching resulted in two job offers. As a result, I got a job remotely in a Moscow company with very pleasant and loyal management and team. After working remotely from Chelyabinsk for about 3 more months, I moved to Sochi with my family. Now I work at a convenient time in a convenient place, although there are specifics to remote work. But this is a separate topic. A couple of conclusions and advice

1. The most important! JavaRush has a ton of (I emphasize) interesting levels and tasks. Always keep yourself in professional shape, solve at least one task a day!
2. Look for a good place to work that you will like! Fortunately, programmers are now in great demand. Seriously, I considered myself an average programmer until I worked with my colleagues and saw how they write: my self-esteem went up!