My name is Evgeniy, I am 27 years old, I have a child and a second one on the way. I live most of the time in the city of Yekaterinburg. I have an education as a communications engineer and worked as a system administrator for several years after graduating from university. Today is the last day of my probation, although two weeks ago my teamleader said that you don’t have to worry, you’re staying. What I have today:
Work in an international company (all customers without exception are from the West, mainly Sweden, Norway). bodyshop company.
Possibility of rotation, there are many clients, different projects, everyone can choose what they like.
Visiting native speakers twice a week.
Annual trip to a corporate event abroad.
Good cuisine, lots of goodies.
A wonderful team, the number of smart people per 1 sq.m is simply fantastic.
But let's go back a little, just a year and a half ago I didn't have anything even close to that. I worked in a state company as a system administrator, received the average salary for a hospital, knew mediocre English, and in general there was no hope that life would start to get better. By chance on social media networks I came across the site JavaRush.ru, one friend described it as a cool way to become a programmer and that he had already completed 5 levels in a couple of days. I decided to try it because... Even at school I was interested in it and even wanted to enroll in the then USU to study mathematics and mechanics, but I lost my way. In general, why am I actually worse? It’s just a matter of little things, I slowly completed 10 levels in a month, and then there was a promotion for a 50% discount, I bought an annual subscription. A month later, I quit my job as an admin and went to spend the winter with my family in Thailand, with the thought that I would study every day and nothing would stop me. By this time I was studying English intensively, perhaps a topic for another article, but the thing that helped me most was getting started with podcasts in English I started with VOA, and then gradually increased the complexity with the advent of understanding. If anyone is interested in more details, ask in the comments. I began to implement my plan as soon as we arrived in the city of Ao Nang in Krabi province and found ourselves a house for the season. I can say one thing, you need to study regularly and everything will work out, I had about 8-12 hours of work 5 days a week, which included both writing code and English classes. I can say one thing, even on New Year’s Day, I started working on January 2nd. I didn’t give myself any concessions, although of course there were moments when motivation dropped and I wanted to give up everything, the success stories here on the site helped a lot, I promised myself then that I would definitely write my own, maybe it will help someone in difficult times to find strength in themselves and defeat the validator (restaurant and archiver, hello) + 20 years of experience in sports helped a lot here, I did everything according to schedule. Over the weekend, my wife and daughter traveled by motorcycle to the nearest provinces of Thailand, enjoying nature and weather. I rested as much as possible, this is also part of the work, although sometimes on weekends I sat down to code or read a book on Java when I really couldn’t bear it, but I tried to stick to the regime. After about the new year, I was at level 25-30, I decided then that I was a cool programmer (actually not), it was time to get a job, I made a resume for hh, applications started pouring in, again I won’t describe how I wrote it, but I worked on it for a couple of weeks, and then regularly updated it, then translated it into English, designed everything in the best possible way, although I had no experience in programming, but HR people clearly liked it, they actually wrote quite often. Naturally, the first few interviews brought me back to earth, I realized how much I still didn’t know and what I knew needed to be specifically structured, which is what I did. After that, the choice arose whether to go Android or JavaEE, I tried the first, went through the HeadFirst book and in total wrote about 30 small projects, but then, using one of the sites for learning English, I saw how cool their layout was for mobile phones and how poorly the mobile application worked. I thought about it and decided to learn JavaEE. Looking ahead, I can say that I haven’t given up on the idea of learning Android and now I plan to master it. Nevertheless, at that time I abandoned the idea of android. Long story short, I started learning the accompanying technologies that are required: sql/maven/git/spring/hibernate and I’ll probably highlight the rest architecture separately, they often ask about it, and in general, the first two of my projects that went into production were the rest api. You need to know all this, everyone asks this, but you can know it superficially, write 10 other small projects using them, for example, an internship assignment can actually be written in half a day, a day, without a front, it’s not needed in Java, you can teach a little JS/React/Node, if you want to go to the front, but you can generally only teach them and not learn Java at all, there is a lot more work and customers there, but they have their own specifics. In general, around May I returned to Russia, because I had business here and decided that it was time to get a job in an office; before that, all the interviews were done via Skype (I never received an offer at that time).. I returned to Russia and started walking around interviews, I really don’t like it because it takes a lot of moral and physical strength, and greatly interferes with the process of studying and writing code in general (Skype helps), so I went a couple of times a week, in some places more experienced people were needed, in others I didn’t I liked it, but in the end I passed another interview via Skype, they wanted to send me straight away to work onsite in Sweden, naturally my experience was not enough, but the teamleader liked me and he recommended me for an internal project, after which I passed another interview already in our office in Yekaterinburg, where they asked a couple of questions and a couple in English, after which they said, I quote your English: “it can be worse,” which of course hurt the ego, but again gave a kick to learn further, they let us go “for a walk” and after 10 made me an offer in minutes, at that time I expected much less. Naturally, I accepted the offer.. I would like to dwell specifically on the first months of work, for some reason few people write about them, but for me they were a real nightmare, I thought I would be fired, to be honest. It was hellishly difficult, they gave me the task of immediately writing my own project, or rather part of the project is one micro service, but for me it was rather a huge monster, because I had to think through everything from the architecture and frameworks used to exception handling. I was very nervous and thought that they expected me to do it all in a couple of weeks, which made it very difficult to concentrate on the task and make the right decisions. As a result, a huge thank you to my team leader, he helped me a lot, explained many basic things and did not put any pressure on me at all. Of course one more thing helped me. After about two months of work, I had an interview with another company where they offered me a salary that was a third higher than mine, I did not accept the offer for a number of reasons, but nevertheless it greatly increased my self-esteem and confidence in the future as a developer. Sorry for the long text, and thanks to everyone who read to the end. ps: I think, as I experience, I will supplement the article with small notes, if anyone is interested in this writing of mine Addition #1 Thank you all for your comments, I am glad that my writing received so many responses. I tried to remove the typos that were mentioned in the comments, and don’t judge too harshly for mistakes, we all make them. Now to the point.
How I learned English.
One of the comments already provided a link to Voice of America. For me this was the starting point, the exact name "VOA. That's what they say in America." Then there were podcasts without the Russian language, I listened in order to the most popular ones, like Luke's English and ESL Pod, when I got used to it or got tired of looking for others, there is an excellent article on the site, in my opinion , I recommend it to everyone. In general, after I was more or less accustomed to English speech and could separate words from the stream of speech, I realized that my vocabulary left much to be desired and began to learn words, here the well-known Linguleo helped me, you can use it for free.
How I went to spend the winter in Thailand.
Everyone is concerned about how you can afford this with an average salary. There are no special secrets; the book “The Richest Man in Babylon” by Clayson George helped me a lot. Further, if you are interested in the topic of financial literacy, there are quite a lot of books about this, probably this is a topic for a separate article.
How could I become a programmer by making so many grammatical mistakes?
Not a single employer was concerned about this issue, to be honest. But of course I tried not to do them in my resume and double-checked everything 10 times.
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