However... there is such a concept in the IT sphere - “technical debt”. So, I clearly remember, as if it were yesterday, how I promised myself to pay off my conditional technical debt when the conditional debt came at that time, so I will share, and I will do it not just somewhere, but right here, because (it’s funny to remember this now ) it all started in many ways with JavaRush. Yes, and this is definitely not a “success story” or instructions for anything. This is, rather, a short story about how one guy was looking for himself at a certain stage of his life’s journey and finally found it, and along with finding himself, he also found some kind of harmony in life :) Returning to our sheep: where to start, yes so as not to stretch it to the size of a story? Perhaps from the prosaic “I’m 26 and mine is a humanities major. Wow! wow!” Wow, I feel better! This, you know, feeling like you are holding a seemingly not shameful fact about yourself for a long time and, due to constant attempts not to show it and not stop protruding your chest for many months, you throw this fact out to the first person you meet. It's like suddenly unbuttoning a tight shirt and dumping an overgrown belly on the table, which is only suitable as a coaster for a pint of beer. You stroke a couple of kilograms of fat in public, which felt so foreign for most of your life, but (to give it its due) led to a certain point of no return, to a subjective feeling of one’s own worthlessness, became a lever to... In general, you understand :) Hmm, so here it is. Being not exactly out-of-touch, but still a humanist, I entered the architecture department of a regional university with the wind blowing. It’s just that languages, drawing/painting and three-dimensional thinking were a little better than higher mathematics and physics (perhaps that’s what I thought myself - such thoughts have not stirred my consciousness for a long time). Now I understand: if the wind had blown in the direction of any related (or perhaps completely unrelated) profession, I would have rushed there without resisting, without thinking about the consequences. In short, throughout my conscious youth I lived and did not worry too much about where the current would take me. The funny thing is that the weaker and softer it carried somewhere, the more willingly I gave in. Indifference in its purest form, nothing special. I graduated (or rather, spat out) from the university just as quickly and easily as I entered. Probably, the situation even helped in some way, because it was 2014 - a year that left many imprints on some Russian-speaking and not so Russian-speaking countries and one way or another changed the fate of many people. He influenced my fate in the following way: at the beginning of summer, I picked up my diploma without much hesitation and realized that in the next couple of days I needed to get out of the city, the political situation in which, being already shitty, began to heat up. So, literally taking the penultimate train before the city railway station turned into a hot spot for a long time, I found myself 2000 km from my hometown in a truly large metropolis with beautiful architecture and not the most comfortable climate. It's funny, but in this wonderful city, full of opportunities, I was not destined to truly enter the profession. I am grateful to him for something else, namely, for the final realization that it is time to change ourselves, and that we ourselves and no one else create our destiny, because no one will insert a steel rod into our consciousness on the way to the goal except ourselves. Template? Let be. The main thing is the truth. I won’t go into deep details of what preceded the start of the long and not to say easy path of becoming a software developer. I’ll just say that in my case, in order to give myself one of the most powerful ass kickers in my life, it took (the order may not fully correspond to reality):
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To rush around a seemingly too big unfamiliar city in search of trashy/cheap housing.
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To rush around in search of a more or less paid job, struggling with options, some of which still seem pretty trashy.
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Lower the standard of living to the level of the plinth, do not take care of your health at all, smoke like a locomotive at times and do not neglect alcohol on weekdays.
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Fall into melancholy, which every day strove to turn into a protracted depression.
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Walk around the city with a rotten climate on the weekends between shifts at daily work, develop chronic sinusitis, otitis media, etc.
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With nothing in your head, enroll in a budget-funded master's program at one of the best architectural universities in the country where you are located.
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Suffering from boredom at my next daily part-time job, I suddenly (sic!) think that my entire adult life, in fact, was somehow connected with IT (long periods of gaming activity, work in 3D/rendering, work in office programs, the Internet - I spent thousands of hours on all this), but damn it, I'm on the wrong side!
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Attention! (*_*) Podzhopnik moment (perhaps you are somewhere here? Or a little further? Well, then let's move on!)
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Google everything on the topic “Sap, Internet! I want to develop software, where to start?)0)0” (Yes, an eternal remark for those who doubt: believe me, the sooner the future developer comprehends the kung fu of Google, the better).
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Spend ~a week on forums like Quora, etc. and understand that there are, in fact, a lot of development paths, and first you need to stop at one thing.
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Stumble upon the JavaRush website (I’m lying, I found it almost on the first day of searching, but put it aside) and get lost in it, “since something like Python and JS is too easy and primitive, like C++ is too difficult, but Java is just right!” (hehe, that’s exactly how I reasoned then)).
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Start to smile, because most of the time during work shifts was no longer spent on mindlessly absorbing unnecessary information from the Internet, but was spent on twisting the crazy brains that begged to stop this violence against them into a tube.
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Having reached level 20-25, you begin to doubt the “correctness” of your choice and investment of time (funny thoughts for a person who at that time could not even remember the last time he truly consciously invested in his own development). At the same time, dig even deeper into other self-taught conveyors like Codecademy and Freecodecamp.
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Spend another summer at the computer - no matter where - at work or at home - during breaks to eat (that’s right - not to eat, but to eat quickly) and chat with your loved one before going to bed (almost never falling asleep with him).
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That same summer, take a short course in Android development, in which the training application was, in fact, rolled up almost exactly from the original without much understanding of what was going on inside (wait, this will be important for the further development of the story). Scratch at your temple and think to yourself, frowning: “Funny! But not serious...”
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Leave... no, not like that. Enroll in the second year of your master's program and pick up your documents at the beginning of the academic year. Yes, that’s exactly how indifferent I was at that moment to what I had been trying to learn for many years. Even then, I firmly decided: I didn’t just like the path of a machine whisperer, no. I live for it.
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In the fall, sign up for a JavaRush internship, pass the introductory course, and start delving into Spring with all that it entails (it helped me get comfortable with Java 8 and, interestingly, start looking towards functionality that I had no reason to encounter before).
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Finish the internship with the obsessive thought that the enterprise is, in general, not really mine (not mine at all). Quit your last part-time job at that time.
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With grief, I asked to work remotely on a wild legacy project (minimum Spring and JS, maximum Servlets and SQL) through a friend from my native land.
Having not worked there for even three months, thank a friend (the office collapsed) and try to find a job in a big beautiful city without citizenship of the country where you are, without much experience and without exceptional faith in yourself. -
After ~2 months of attempts, I began to think about moving 1500 kilometers closer to the place where I came from (the lack of success and the small number of these very attempts played into my hands).
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Get closer to your home. Starting to work in a non-IT job, which (suddenly!) turned out to be much easier to find than in Java EE.
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Open a brand new book on Kotlin, bought during the last days of your stay in a distant city, and fall in love with it from the first 50 lines of code.
Stumble upon an article that “this year the Good Corporation decided to switch to Kotlin for Android development and what it gives us.” With wild enthusiasm, start learning to write and, in fact, write for Android, killing all your free time on this. -
Get a shitload of bruises and interesting experiences on your first (your!!!) application. Write a simple backend for it in Spring.
Host the backend, upload the application to the Market. Understand that without the proper investment, study of the subject area and market, scope and luck, no one will download your app. -
Continue to fiddle with Android, loving the very concept of mobile development with all my heart. Climbing up the mountain, like a stubborn donkey, write and upload to the market the 2nd and 3rd apps, which, with virtually no advertising, still downloaded an order of magnitude more than the 1st (hehe, classic).
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Have time to freelance a little on the Web and Android. After some time, you understand (no, not like that: convince yourself!) that it’s (possibly) cool to do freelancing when you’re over 50, you’re (perhaps) tired of the eternal bustle of microsociety, you want to calmly save up for the slow, but not so distant retirement, and the time has come for me to look for a static job in the field of Mobile development.
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Kill a couple more months to prepare for the interview (in general, the previous materials on Java and OOP were useful, with the exception of Spring and EE, of course). I realized that over the past year or so I have completely forgotten how to use my tongue and tell a theory.
Screw everything up miserably at the first interview. -
Get to a few more interviews - a little more, but still unsuccessful. It’s almost easy to start communicating with local recruiters.
Understand that the average level of English among local recruiters (and others) is an order of magnitude lower than mine. Have time to communicate even with a couple of funny “startups” from overseas, consisting in fact of one and a half yesterday’s students. Make sure once again (for yourself and only for yourself) that most normal firms are looking for at least those who call themselves Middles, and in most cases what can help you is not so much a passable portfolio, but the ability to successfully (no, masterfully) build an illusion that you have at least a year of commercial(s) experience. -
On an unforeseen sunny day, get into a small, but airy and well-lit office of a small, but in its own way magical company not far from the city center, chat with the foreign manager in English, and then try to get rid of the thought that this is exactly the place where I would like to spend the next year or more.
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Receive an offer in 2 weeks, practically on a day off, in the midst of a get-together with old friends (as if we didn’t already have reasons to cross our glasses :))
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PROFIT.
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(bonus). Communicate in English several times a week (the norm when you don’t work for the domestic market), have a small, cozy team where everyone respects each other, and the most free, unobtrusive work schedule I’ve ever encountered before.
Get yourself in order - physically and mentally. Gain confidence in yourself as a specialist. Find an insatiable desire to grow further. And the most important thing is to do what you really like every day.
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