I'm 24 and I'm a slob

Dossier

• Who: Ilija Neuner
• Job title: radio engineer
• Place of residence: Ryazan, Russia
• Age at start of Java training: 23
• Original success story

I'm 24 and I'm a slob. I live and work in Ryazan. Today ( September 2015, editor's note ) I completed the last day of my programmer probationary period. At first I studied at a military university ( I wanted to become an astronaut ), but in my third year I was safely expelled for fighting in a club. Last year I graduated from a radio engineering university and went to work as a specialist . I really liked the job for the first week, but then the production manager came. She... how can I put it mildly... In short, we did not become friends with her. For three months I tried to come to terms with this fact, but in the end I quit and got a job as a business engineer in a small IT company. And it was there that an event happened to me that changed my whole life (and JavaRush is indirectly related to it).

Walking motivator, JavaRush and others

A guy who graduated from Ryazan Agricultural College worked as a programmer in this office. RYAZAN AGRICULTURE, KARL!!!

He took it and learned Java. Myself. According to books. I was shocked.

It was the end of September. I remembered about Java Rush , in which I somehow solved a couple of levels and, as usual, scored. I gave up because I thought it was impossible to learn programming on my own. But my colleague served as a kind of walking motivator for me. The last day of the promotion remained ( Java Rush shares , editor's note ), and I managed to buy a subscription on the last day for 4,500 rubles ( that's 100 bucks, yes, yes, it happened, they gave 45 rubles for a dollar ). I started studying, and by January I had completed 23 levels . I wrote Tetris, took interview questions from JavaRush and went to get a job.

Actively looking

There were no vacancies in my beautiful city, but I found an office that had an internship. I somehow passed the interview, but they told me that if anyone undertakes to maintain my code, they will kill me on the first day. I was advised to read " Perfect Code " by McConnell. At the same time , they did not need Java Junior and suggested switching to C# . I started reading the book “ CLR via C# ”, but in time I changed my mind about going over to the side of evil, abandoned this reading and started reading “ Spring in Action ” and tutorials on Hibernate . Later, I had another interview, after which I was offered to switch to Scala , but I did not take this adventure.

Next was an interview for an Android developer, for which I wrote an application - a voice recorder. But they didn’t hire me... They said they found a guy with experience.

I continued to monitor Head Hunter , and one day I came across the coveted Java Junior vacancy!!! I passed the interview quite successfully: by that time I already knew the basics of SQL , Hibernate , Spring and knew how to write acceptable code. I was given the task of writing a time tracking system ( Vaadin + Hibernate + MySQL + Maven ). When I wrote it, it turned out that the guy who interviewed me had gone on vacation, but another vacancy had appeared. Not sickly, I must say. The company needed a leading programmer with 3 to 6 years of experience .

I exaggerated a little and was right!

I went there solely to gain experience in interviews, without the thought that I might be hired.

I showed them my Android voice recorder and time tracking system on Git, slightly exaggerated my experience, answered questions for three hours... They told me they would call me.

The next day they actually called me and said that they wanted to hire me from 2 departments, but both had very ancient technologies. Fortunately, the department, which is assigned to Moscow (and all more or less adequate projects went to them), needed a programmer, and I was offered to try to get an interview there. Which I successfully did! I was hired as a presenter, which didn’t upset me at all. The salary was also the same as that of the presenter. Technologies on the project: Oracle DB, Hibernate, Spring , Spring Integration, GWT, Git, Maven . Something like this : )

Advice for Future Java Champions

• In fact, Java Rush does not teach you to write beautiful code ( this was true until Java Rush introduced code style checking for a while ). Read Java Code Conventions before interviews, or better yet, “ Perfect Code ” + Java Conventions .
• Find a programmer friend or acquaintance who would be willing to point you in the right direction.

PS : Thanks Java Rush !!! Special thanks to Ivan Golovach and Yuri Tkach for the lessons on YouTube. PPS : After level 10 there was an article about California. I hope to one day get a job in California and write a success story here.