The story of a former economist

My name is Roma, 22 years old, Izhevsk. I currently work for Finch. In this post I want to tell you my interesting story of becoming a Java developer. At the end, I wrote some tips that I hope will help you achieve your goal. I’ll start my story from the time I started university in 2014. I studied in St. Petersburg at the Higher School of Economics, of course, as an economist. I knew English quite poorly (which undoubtedly had a negative impact in the future), so I entered the university thanks to an Olympiad in mathematics, which I knew much better than languages. The first two courses went pretty quickly, there were a lot of events and frequent group meetings. I think the situation is similar in many universities. The problem was that I did not understand how to develop in my specialty. To be honest, I didn’t think much about it. Despite the fact that the institution was quite good, students did not have many options when graduating:

• Graduate from university and simply get a job in an office as an assistant accountant;
• Continue your master's studies. According to the teachers, only there could we gain the necessary knowledge and find our way;
• Or learn about your specialty, companies, and independently acquire the necessary skills through books and videos.

In the middle of the training, introductory courses related to data analysis (DA) began. There we wrote simple scripts for reading and processing data from a file in R (and a little Python). There was no continuation of these courses, but I realized that I would rather do this. Here you do some real work, work with numbers, and not solve abstract problems about plant A and plant B. When I looked at the possibilities of development in this area, there were a lot of options. There were two free schools on AD at Yandex and the Computer Science Center, many courses on Coursera (they were even in Russian) and many examples on YouTube. However, after the joy of the wide possibilities, I was disappointed. There was an insane demand for schools, which made the competition very difficult, especially for someone who had not yet fully programmed. There was only one full course on Coursera, where access to assignments was expensive (for the student). But since I definitely decided to change the vector of my development, I used any free sources, even library textbooks. At this rate, in my third year I was absolutely sure that I would go to AD. Moreover, I even wrote a term paper on this topic. And in the summer after my third year, when I was looking for an internship or a job, I realized that this was not going to be easy. In St. Petersburg I found only 10 suitable vacancies, and after two interviews I realized that I needed to know much more, including mathematics. After such a failure, I learned that this specialty really requires education or a much deeper immersion, since there were too many self-taught people like me. Overall, I can say that what I liked was not the specific area, but the creation of something that works and can be useful. Therefore, I spent the next months searching for which path I could take and what would be interesting to me. YouTube videos from experienced developers talking about their profession and existing programming specialties helped with this. I already knew roughly what IT was. And then I unexpectedly came across an advertisement for JavaRush on VK. I was quite skeptical about various paid programming courses, but I tried 10 free levels. The practical tasks were easy, but all the explanations and descriptions were so clear that I decided to take this course to the end. In August 2017, I purchased a subscription and progressed through the level almost every day, fortunately while time allowed. I understood that it would be difficult to understand the structure of OOP and all the syntax from books or individual videos, having zero knowledge. Already in September I received the coveted level 40. I tried not to miss tasks, and completed almost everything. But by the end, I wanted to get the last level so much that I simply skipped the last tasks of the levels without even spending an hour. That same month, I heard about the EPAM internship, where they take final-year students with the next job opportunity. I applied, passed the interview (they only asked about the basics of OOP and basic Java) and already in December attended courses in the evenings, together with students like me. These were some of the best months, the course was clear (in many ways it was the same as JavaRush) and there was a good campaign of students like me. Having successfully passed the exam after this course, the laboratory at EPAM began, which consisted of attending courses and working on educational projects. I learned a lot from this laboratory, I managed to work with Hibernate and Spring, but it was noticeable that it was dragging on. I never left the university; I thought it was too bad to quit in my last year. I don’t know for sure whether this is the right decision, but the last year has turned into torture, because I was absolutely sure that I would not do this. When May came, I no longer went to university, but only wrote my thesis and got a job as a Ruby tester for at least some income, while simultaneously visiting the EPAM laboratory. I didn’t know the Ruby language, and I still don’t know it, but writing tests didn’t require such knowledge. There were ready-made examples that had to be modified for specific pages. After the long-awaited defense of my diploma, I left EPAM, switched to working as a tester remotely and went to my hometown of Izhevsk to decide where to get a job from there. It took me a long time to decide on my first interview. I tried to repeat everything and learn what they might ask me at an interview - JVM, Spring, algorithms, databases... And only a month later, in August, I started submitting my first applications. The cities I sent to were St. Petersburg and Moscow. For the first week no one answered me at all. Only after several attempts to improve the resume and starting to write a cover letter for each company did the first answers appear. In the first interviews, half of the questions were about something completely different that I was preparing for - http, protocols, graphs. But after each one, I wrote down what I didn’t answer, found out the answer, and continued sending my resume. I did this every day, 10-20 resumes came out per day, but only a few responded. At the beginning of September, on a Friday, it happened that there were three interviews in a row. Despite the first failure, I answered the second quite successfully, and I was immediately invited for a trial period with a good rate in Moscow. The joy at that moment knew no bounds, so by the third time I hardly tried. A couple of days later, I bought tickets, set a date of arrival and agreed to another in-person interview with another company that did not conduct them via Skype. I stayed with a friend for the first time. At the in-person interview, I was already prepared for almost all the questions, and received a job offer on the same day. Before that, I couldn’t even imagine that I would have a choice; I wasn’t ready for this. But I chose the first one, where I currently work - Finch. This is not a big company, but it does large projects. After the experience at EPAM, I realized that I am much more comfortable in small ones than in places where there are thousands of people, bureaucracy and you move around often. I was immediately given a workplace, and I happily began to dive into my first project. Now I think that this is the best place, especially for a junior. Certainly, I didn’t tell everything in the story, but I tried to describe all the really important points that can help others. Personally, I can draw several conclusions for myself:

• Changing your major is not always difficult. It is important to find good preparation materials and establish a development path in advance.
• EPAM is a good continuation after JavaRush, where you can get the experience that is so necessary at the start. But getting a full-time job there is difficult, and career advancement there will be noticeably slower.
• In interviews, they rarely ask for libraries and frameworks that are specified in the requirements. It’s better to review algorithms, database basics, how the Internet works, and design patterns before the interview.
• If you write a cover letter aimed at this company along with your resume, your chances of getting a response increase dramatically. It's worth your time. It is also worth attaching your photo.
• You need to look for vacancies in several sources at once. Not only hh, but also linkedInd and Moi Krug (here I found my current company).
• Before interviews, it is advisable to watch video examples of interviews and prepare for the questions they contain. There are quite a lot of them on YouTube.

I wish everything works out for you too. The main thing is to continue and not be afraid))