The post will be short. I am 38 years old, married, have a child, have a humanities education, and until last year I worked exclusively in non-technical professions. He worked for a long time, perhaps even too long. And at some point I realized that I no longer wanted to work in my previous field. My wife advised me to try my hand at IT, and after the first doubts and objections, I settled on programming.
The choice of programming language took place in a bookstore in front of a shelf with IT literature - among the shelves with books on C++, C#, JS, Python, etc. the shelves with Java were visually the most numerous. As various studies on the popularity of programming languages show, my intuitive selection criteria turned out to be quite adequate. My acquaintance with the language began with the Head First series “Learning Java”. Having worked through the book, I began to read others and then found the website javarush.ru (JR). The first 16 levels flew by quickly, with virtually no difficulties. Now I can confidently say that JR provides an excellent opportunity to get acquainted and practice the language. In terms of price/quality ratio compared to other available courses, it’s certainly true. However, a simple search for vacancies on HH will show that there are a number of technologies that are absolutely necessary to get a job, but are practically not represented on JR: Git, Maven/Gradle, SQL, JDBC, Servlet, Spring, Hibernate (still desirable, but JS, HTML, CSS are optional). I learned all this on courses from another company for an order of magnitude more money than on JR. By the way, perhaps all this is included in the JR internship, but I never got to it and it’s difficult for me to judge how adequate the knowledge given there is. I was left with the impression that the JR course is good, but not sufficient. The whole path from absolute zero to getting a job took exactly a year of studying in the evenings with all the accompanying breaks caused by periodic declines in motivation, life circumstances, etc. Now I’ve been working as a programmer for 9 months (back-up in a large company) and I’m very pleased with it (I worked remotely all summer, I was in the office probably ten times - I stopped by to discuss something for an hour or two), in my free time I’m gradually mastering Android. What is all this for? From time to time on forms I read something like “I’m 25 years old, is it too late for me to start learning programming?” No, I assure you. It's not too late. Not yet. The fact is that now is a unique time when IT companies in Russia are rapidly developing and good programmers with experience are difficult to find, so companies are increasingly hiring juniors without experience to train specialists themselves. They take it even if the junior’s age is already approaching 40 and he does not have a technical education. This situation, generally speaking, is not normal and cannot last long; sooner or later the market will reach a saturation level and the threshold for entering the profession will become higher, much higher. However, now (and, I believe, in the next year or two) the window of career opportunities is still open.
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