Greetings! So I decided to write an article. They once really motivated me. In short, I am currently working as a Golang developer (traitor), and in general I have a little more than a year of commercial experience in IT. Before this, I worked as a Java developer for a year at a large telecom company.
Actually, history. At the moment, I am 22 years old, when I decided to become a developer I was 20. By the way, I am a programmer by profession, but I learned practically nothing in terms of programming from university and college. The only thing was a general understanding of the work of loops, conditions and arrays in programming languages, which, you see, is so-so knowledge for a “certified specialist”. But in general there was an understanding of how the computer works. Processor interruptions, how memory works and other fun things were taught to us quite well (based on “Computer Architecture” by Tanenbaum, if I’m not mistaken). Somehow, a friend motivated me and in a short period of time I became acquainted with HTML/CSS/JavaScript. That is, I still had a general idea of what was happening. So, what kind of base did I have? If you can call it a base. And so I came across JR for the first time and decided to try learning Java. I completed 5 levels in two weeks and quit due to personal reasons. For another year I “looked for myself” in another business, but the search did not work out. As a result, I continued my studies at JR and in a month (August 2016) I reached level 20. I can’t say that it was super productive, because no matter how hard you try, some things have to “compact” in your head over time. As a result, I, determined, signed up for an interview for a course from a company that was conducting it with the goal of recruiting the best students to work after graduation. I think the logical result was that they gave me a little time at the technical interview :) That’s when I came across the first very interesting thing: your real programming skills are not tested in any way at the interview, only theory is the price here (personal conclusions, don’t blame me) . Moreover, 80% of the theory is unlikely to be useful to you. And I understand perfectly why this happens, but at that moment it was a discovery for me. Drew conclusions. I decided to push myself with practice and strengthen it with theory before trying to pass interviews. As a result, somewhere until mid-November 2016, I solved problems on JR and crawled to level 25, adjusting what I didn’t understand before. Now I was already working on quality. I tried to understand as much as possible before moving on to the next task. Another month and a half was spent working with databases. In January 2017, I could already write a simple reference book based on JavaFx && MySQL. The web remained a mystery to me at that time. However, for the last two months I have been sending out my terrible resume wherever possible :) And it has paid off. After a while, it even began to seem to me that I was blacklisted by some companies. There was no response, just ignorance (yes, I know what HR’s work is, but at that time it really seemed that way to me). But, oddly enough, even though I live in Odessa, I was called for an interview at a food company in Kharkov. By Skype. This time I already managed to improve my theory and studied the questions for Junior Java. However, it was still not enough. There were questions that you are unlikely to find anywhere on the Internet. From the category, why did the language developers do it this way? By the way, very cool questions. You can’t memorize this; you need ingenuity and understanding. My ingenuity is so-so in stressful situations, but apparently there were problems with understanding. However, I later worked on these issues. And this helped me a lot at the next interview. A month later, a new enrollment started for courses from the company, which I did not take last time. And since everything was decided by theory, I started reading the “Java Professional Library”, before that I went to the university and read “Java Philosophy” in lectures. In a month I completed 1800 technical pages. literature, but I can’t say that this somehow influenced the situation. At the same time, I somehow crawled to level 31. Problems started at the university, I stayed up all night finishing the labs, then I came and waited until the evening to turn them in. And when I finally passed and stayed on the budget, I went home and went to bed. I woke up an hour before the start of the interviews and immediately rushed :) As a result, they told me that everything was ok with Java, but SQL was at the bottom. But, nevertheless, they still took me to the course. There were lectures on Java, Oracle DB and practice. There was also a training project where I became acquainted with Spring and, in principle, creating web applications in Java. The courses are wonderful, they really improve your skills, especially in SQL. I was very lucky with the team: out of 6 people there were 4, including me, who really wanted to get the job. After defending the educational project, 3 were called for an interview. In the end, my teammate and I were taken. It is worth noting that the 3rd guy carried the project the most. And at that moment he knew much more than us. Therefore, people, if you are not hired for a job, this is certainly your fault. But this does not mean that you are worse than those who have already been hired. Perhaps even better. By the way, this dude, a couple of days after the refusal, received an offer from another company for a middle position. Why do we still yell when we meet? that everything is ok with Java, but SQL is at the bottom. But, nevertheless, they still took me to the course. There were lectures on Java, Oracle DB and practice. There was also a training project where I became acquainted with Spring and, in principle, creating web applications in Java. The courses are wonderful, they really improve your skills, especially in SQL. I was very lucky with the team: out of 6 people there were 4, including me, who really wanted to get the job. After defending the educational project, 3 were called for an interview. In the end, my teammate and I were taken. It is worth noting that the 3rd guy carried the project the most. And at that moment he knew much more than us. Therefore, people, if you are not hired for a job, this is certainly your fault. But this does not mean that you are worse than those who have already been hired. Perhaps even better. By the way, this dude, a couple of days after the refusal, received an offer from another company for a middle position. Why do we still yell when we meet? that everything is ok with Java, but SQL is at the bottom. But, nevertheless, they still took me to the course. There were lectures on Java, Oracle DB and practice. There was also a training project where I became acquainted with Spring and, in principle, creating web applications in Java. The courses are wonderful, they really improve your skills, especially in SQL. I was very lucky with the team: out of 6 people there were 4, including me, who really wanted to get the job. After defending the educational project, 3 were called for an interview. In the end, my teammate and I were taken. It is worth noting that the 3rd guy carried the project the most. And at that moment he knew much more than us. Therefore, people, if you are not hired for a job, this is certainly your fault. But this does not mean that you are worse than those who have already been hired. Perhaps even better. By the way, this dude, a couple of days after the refusal, received an offer from another company for a middle position. Why do we still yell when we meet?
It took me exactly a year to receive my first offer. After getting hired, I set myself the goal of growing to middle position within a year. This is what I reported to the line manager (the person who is responsible for your career growth, as a rule, a developer who followed the management branch). It’s worth paying tribute to, they didn’t laugh at me, and even on the contrary: they suggested that every month I describe the type of work I did, what new things I managed to learn, do, what I had never encountered before, in order to somehow track my growth. This is what I did. And this is very motivating. Because when you get used to the project and know a large section of the code, you relax a little, as you get your bearings in everything. But when you realize that you need to tell something at the end of the month, you begin to take on tasks that initially seem too difficult to you. And as a result, after 3-4 months of such work, it’s unlikely that anything will scare you. There is a task and you must implement it. How is up to you. Whether it’s bad or good, they’ll check it for review and advise. This all happened just at the time my mentor left the company. When the only person who knew the project well leaves, and instead of him there remains a pack of juniors 1, expect trouble. Which is what happened, but we had to resolve the trouble ourselves. And when you see that, in principle, it is not really being resolved, you begin to give it your all. And you get a bonus in the form of experience and confidence in your abilities. What is worth noting: 1 The initiative was always received with joy. When I tried to improve already established processes, no one said, “Oh, hello, where are you going, jun?” It was felt that someone needed it, which was naturally captivating. A person just came from a new set of courses and was sent to us to develop a new feature. And I even had the opportunity to be a mentor for a couple of months) However, there were also disadvantages, as everywhere else, despite the fact that I gave my best and this was encouraged with bonuses, I felt that in terms of career growth I was at the bottom. I also usually worked with old technologies, so there was a slight fear that I would find myself unnecessary on the labor market (there was no Spring or Hibernate on the project). All I know about these things is my personal developments in my free time. Plus, whatever one may say, your salary and your skills grow asynchronously. Very. And it seemed like a big company, not poor customers, my personal salary was half the market rate. In connection with all this, I decided to leave and began looking for a new job. I managed to pass two interviews. Both seemed successful, but each did not provide feedback. I received an offer from someone else. For the position of Back-End Developer, where the back-end was written in Golang. I accepted the offer and am still working to this day. Golang is quite an interesting language. But there are also things that I don't like. The code is written faster, but at the same time, IMHO, error handling is terrible. There is no overloading of methods and functions. It's downright painful. Well, there are no generics, which in turn is very constraining. To summarize, I would like to express my opinion on some personal observations and conclusions:
Reading tech. literature has absolutely no effect on the level of your salary, position, dividends.
If you decide to read technical literature, in my humble opinion, the best development is in books that convey some best practices and ideas in software development rather than specific tools and rules for their use. (For example: "The Ideal Programmer", "Effective Java")
The interview is random. If you don’t pass, you analyze, draw conclusions, learn something and move on to a new one. Each time the chance is higher.
If you are not hired as a junior, try as a middle :)
Switching to a new language is not a problem.
PS: I always wanted to try myself as a teacher. At the moment I don’t have much time to do this, but it’s enough to mentor beginning developers. At one time I really missed this. Often the question arose whether I was doing the right thing, but there was no one to ask. Therefore, if you need help, or just give me a hint about the code, please contact me, I will be happy to help :) Skype - sanek12good Email - sashamerlyan@gmail.com
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