It’s unlikely that my story is similar to the others; they all have their own nuances. I’m writing my story because I remember very well how much other people’s employment stories motivated me. I hope it will help you too, my dear reader. In fact, in this story there will not be a word about the mechanics of a deformed solid. Except, perhaps, for mentioning the fact that this is the specialty of the author of this success story - Sergei Aleshchenko. Currently, this resident of St. Petersburg has changed (we note - successfully changed!) two jobs and settled on the third. Read and you will find out how he managed it (and you will also find out who Sergei considers “lazy asses”). Studies
I have come quite far in education. Graduated from the largest university in St. Petersburg. True, in a completely different specialty: mechanics of deformable solids. At the time of starting Java Rush, I was in my third year of graduate school at the Russian Academy of Sciences (specialty: numerical mechanics).
I don’t remember why I decided to start studying Java Rush . I have long wanted to seriously engage in development, but reading “Talmuds” on languages only discouraged me. I had to find a fundamentally different approach, and I tried the first ten levels of the course. Apparently, thanks to them, I decided to immediately purchase an unlimited subscription with participation in a real project.
Studying was quite slow, but I was constantly moving forward. Completed level 31 with a percentage of solved problems close to 100 . It took me exactly one year to do this.
It's time for an internship. I failed the test task miserably. I needed to write a small web application, but I didn’t have time to do this, because at that time I didn’t even know words like “ Spring ”, “ Hibernate ”, “ Tomcat ”, etc. I didn’t want to wait for the next internship intake, so I independently wrote 5-6 web applications similar to the test task. There are quite a lot of them on the Internet, there are even step-by-step video manuals.
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Separately, I would like to highlight the distribution of resumes and interviews. It is very important! I want to say that if you, dear reader, send out less than 10-15 resumes a day , then you are a lazy ass! That's sorted out.
You also need to be prepared for the fact that you will have to remind yourself every time by calling the company where you sent your resume. As for interviews, with a probability close to 100 percent , you will receive some kind of hardcore test, similar to those that Quizful and other resources abound in. I strongly recommend practicing on such tests.
It took me 3 weeks to find a job . During this time, I completed four face-to-face interviews and two via Skype . There were dozens of refusals. At the last correspondence interview, I was hired.
A little about work
I found myself in a fairly large company ( about 100-120 developers ) with a very wide range of tasks and various projects (depending on the customer), starting from the frontend and ending with the harsh and merciless backend and datamining .
I was immediately involved in ETL projects . I started loading and processing data sets for a number of foreign customers. The platform and all the tools I use are open source. Almost all of them are written in Java and Groovy ( if someone is not familiar with Groovy , it’s a wonderful thing, I recommend it ).
Of course, from time to time you have to delve into the source code, because this whole thing is very cumbersome, and it needs to be regularly updated, optimized and corrected. I've been working for about a month. During this time, I was so intensively “brainwashed” that I swallowed a volume of information that would have taken me at least 2-3 years to assimilate on my own.
Tips This point will save you a lot of time when you are preparing. During my studies, I bought several books: “ Java Philosophy ” by Bruce Eckel, “ Algorithms: Construction and Analysis ” ( Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, Stein ) and several more on databases and computer architecture.
You know what? Score it. I'm serious, forget it. I haven't read a single book to the end. Reading books is a very useful activity, but not in this case.
I will try to explain my point of view: at the moment, your goal is to get a job as a programmer. This does not require deep knowledge of programming, the development of which is what reading books is aimed at. At the moment, you need a very specific set of practical skills and abilities. Picking them out of books is an extremely thankless and tedious task. Much better helpers in this matter will be Java Rush or, if possible, participation in some opensource project. You are unlikely to be able to do anything useful, but at least listen to the intelligent conversations of your colleagues on the project - and you will pick up something. Although participation in projects is not at all necessary. If you need deep knowledge of something, you can easily find it in the book and immediately use it for your tasks. There is no need to swallow the entire book. I think it's time to call it a day. Everyone who read to the end is well done. I wish everyone to maintain a positive attitude and confidently move towards their goals. The trial period was successfully completed in two months ( it was supposed to last three ). During this time, I was involved in two projects: ETL ( I am building the transmart platform for Johnson & Johnson ), and machine learning ( I am writing an application for recognizing objects in images and videos ). 9 months later It's been nine months since the Java Rush course helped me become a developer. And now, my dear reader, I hasten to share the good news and tell you what I was busy with in this short period of time. At my first job ( I won’t give the name of the company, I’ll just say that it was an outsource company ) I got tired of it pretty quickly. Everything was fine there, but there were no serious Java projects ; there were much more C#/.net projects . Besides, after six months I got tired of digging into opensource code; this pleasure is clearly below average. The libraries and tools that I managed to get acquainted with are the most standard: Java , Groovy , Tomcat , Hibernate , a little Spring , a lot of Linux , a lot of Oracle DBMS and postgreSQL . One hot summer morning I received a call from a company that makes a client-server application for a very large bookmaker and offered me a job. There was more money, and the tasks were more interesting. Of course, I immediately agreed. The funny thing is that half a year before that I had an interview with them ( when I was looking for a job for the first time) and they refused me. But now I was a little more experienced and a little bolder. So I worked there for the next few months. However, I quickly learned the difference between client-server applications and web applications. I wanted to do the latter. Here we do not move very smoothly to the next part of the story. Tools that I managed to work with in this company: java , SWT .
I started going on interviews again. Now it was a much more interesting and even enjoyable activity. In fact, it’s not that difficult to prepare, because in most companies during interviews they ask, plus or minus, the same things.
In some cases, you can even predict questions and immediately select the best answer for a particular interviewee. In short, I attended a dozen interviews and had three job offers. The first two are from some small outsource companies with a staff of 100-150 people. I used the third one, which came from Sberbank ( Sbertech ). I will tell you in detail about my work in this company later, now it’s too early, because I’ve only been here for a month. I will only say that the working conditions are more than decent, the team is more than friendly, the tasks are very serious and interesting. I'm sure you, dear reader, liked the second part of my story. I can already hear you rushing as fast as you can to solve the next problem that arrived with Java Rush . I can wish you patience and self-confidence. UPDATE (November 17, 2018) Regarding reading books, I have somewhat changed my mind. The truth is not the opposite, but a little different. The bottom line is this: when preparing for your first job, there is absolutely no need to bury yourself in books. However, after some time, after I had worked for some time, books became good helpers. And naturally, I gradually devoured almost all the books I bought, and even a couple on top. It happened naturally. Moreover, it did not require so much effort, since I had more work experience, and the material in the books no longer seemed so difficult (mostly). At the moment, the list is as follows: 1) Bruce Eckel "Philosophy of Java" 2) Joshua Bloch "Effective Java" 3) Cormen, T., Leiserson, Ch., Rivest, R., Stein, K. "Algorithms: Construction and Analysis" 4) E. Tanenbaum, T. Austin, “Computer Architecture” 5) A hell of a lot of different articles, most of them by foreign authors. And in general, make it a habit to read at least 2-3 articles every day before going to bed. Any IT topic will do, even if not closely related to development. Don't be a big horse in a vacuum, expand your horizons. 6) And of course, a bunch of all kinds of documentation, mainly that which is needed for work. UPDATE (August 1, 2019) I wonder if anyone else is looking here? Or is everyone busy solving problems?)) Well, solve, solve, it’s a useful activity =) A lot of interesting things have happened over the past 2.5 years. First there were administrative changes: a year ago I was transferred from Sbertech to Sberbank PJSC. In addition, I changed the team: in the first I worked on the account opening engine (physics, legal). In the current one (to which I recently transferred) I will be involved in assessing credit risks (a module that collects information about the client and decides whether to give a person a loan or not). The module collects information about a person from various sources (communication operators, government agencies, etc.) In case anyone didn’t know, almost all loans (except for mortgages or if a person has a complex credit history) at Sberbank are issued by a machine. People only connect in difficult or controversial situations. As for the process of working in a bank, everything is simple: there were a million defects (big and small), a lot of improvements to the server part (java), a lot of work with data (gridgain, oracle), there was even a front-end (written in react, redux and other javascript). In parallel with all this disgrace, there was devOps, just out of all the cracks. I wrote a million scripts in yaml, shell, groovy. I did a bunch of jobs (jenkins, nexus) for continuous integration, pipeline and that’s all. I dug around with ansible, docker, wildfly, etc. Administration of Linux stands, of course. With all this, I can’t say that I give out 2 kg of cool code a day, more like 500 g, but still no one offends with money ;) I don’t even know what to say in the end. Most likely, they no longer give tests at interviews; now the trend is for problems in computer science, algorithms and data structures, discrete mathematics, theoretical theory and mathematical statistics. So repeat this whole thing periodically, it is good for your health. For example, I am currently taking a course on algorithms by Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wein (can be found on coursera). I remember with nostalgia how I started my journey to java rush 3.5 years ago, a stingy male tear flowing down my bearded cheek. UPDATE (March 9, 2023) Because of the war he left the country. Putin and his accomplices be damned. Sberbank allowed me to work remotely from abroad for several months, but in mid-December 2022 I was still fired. I had to look for work in foreign companies “all the way up.” It was certainly stressful, but not for long, I worried in vain. I sold myself at the third interview to an Arab-Emirati company for $4,500 per month. The salary is not high by European standards, but living in Georgia is not very expensive, so it’s enough. The company works with SIM card distributors in a number of regions: Africa, the Middle East, Asia. We are writing a client to maintain a database of registered individuals and legal users of SIM cards. There are about 250 employees in total. After 6 years of working in the huge and clumsy Sberbank, working in a small company is like a breath of fresh air. And the people are more interesting, a bunch of foreigners from several dozen countries and from the same regions: Asia, the East, Europe and others. Almost everyone works remotely, and there are many advantages to this. And in Georgia there are quite low taxes, 20% for individuals and only 1% for legal entities. Basically, remote workers living in Georgia register an individual entrepreneur, transfer it to a small business, open a legal account for it and receive a salary in this account. You pay 1% tax and that’s it. I hope they don’t tighten the screws, otherwise we’ll have to move again. I don't know what else to say. I said goodbye to Russia and will never return there again. The skills of a Java developer are really quite easy to export, so thanks to JavaRush for allowing me to get a very popular profession. By the way, over the past couple of years I have convinced two people to buy a premium subscription to JavaRush. I hope your business will live for a long time. Take care of yourself. Glory to Ukraine! Glory to heroes!
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