How (not) to get a Junior position at Epam / What is lab training like?

Hi all! About a year ago I felt it was time to move towards finding a job. Much to my regret, I discovered that knowledge of Java SE is not enough even for Intren’s position, and my resume is not at all in great demand - only a couple of responses to responses in a month, and those were negative. Then, by chance, I came across the company Epam, which conducts free courses and then, upon successful completion, offers an internship on real projects with further employment. There are quite a lot of mixed reviews about Epam on the Internet, and almost nothing from students; in fact, the purpose of my story is to fill this gap. I would like to immediately note that everything described below applies specifically to St. Petersburg and specifically to the Java direction. A large company has many differences from office to office and from project to project, not to mention cities. The path to Epam begins on the website training.ru, where you can select the area of ​​interest in your city, view the requirements and submit an application for participation. In my case it was Java Core training. The selection process for training consists of 3 stages - a telephone interview with HR, where they will ask a few simple technical questions and check your English, computer technical testing + an interview based on its results, as well as a letter in English in the office, and a general interview with HR, where They will learn more about you, your goals, motivation and tell you more about the company. If you successfully complete these stages, you will receive an offer to take part in the training. The training consists of lectures in the office 2-3 times a week in the evening for 3-4 hours, where, as a rule, Java Core is taught (syntax, OOP, collections, exceptions, strings, multithreading in general, JDBC). As a result, the course is designed for approximately 100 hours. The quality of lectures depends on the lecturer, mostly middles/seniors from production, usually quite literate people. In addition to lectures, there are homework assignments, the quality and timeliness of which is one of the criteria for successfully completing the course. In fact, in addition to level 25 in Javarush, I had some experience in developing my own, although not large, pet projects, so the course was quite easy for me - I already knew 80% of the information covered. The end of the training and the key criterion for successful completion differs in different cities. Somewhere, for example in Kyiv, this is a fairly large final project in pure Java, with authorization, servlets and a database. As I was told, almost no one could complete it successfully, therefore, in St. Petersburg they abandoned it in favor of a final test based on certification from Oracle OCA / OCP (IMHO not the best option for testing knowledge, but it is what it is). If you attended class regularly, did your homework well and quickly, and did well on the test (or wrote the project), you get to the next stage - the laboratory, and then the fun begins. I would like to say right away that the lab is not paid. The projects are non-commercial, that is, the company does not receive profit for your work. They also teach you, spend resources and mentors’ time on you. Therefore, no one will pay you. It wasn’t me who came up with this, but the company argues its position in this way. How fair such judgments are - decide for yourself. The lab starts with a three-week project (again, not sure about other cities). As a rule, each student has his own personal project, which will be a kind of addition to the main student project. Usually they are classic CRUD applications with a UI, or a little more complicated ones, which you need to write yourself from scratch. The goal is to get acquainted with the processes within the company, “touch” the technologies used on the project, and generally get comfortable and feel more confident about the tasks on the main project. After presenting your project to your class, mentors, lab management, and just people who are interested, full-fledged studies begin. Typically, the company asks you to devote 20 hours a week to the lab. In general, no one can oblige you to anything, because you are not bound by any contractual relations. However, the duration of the internship will depend on your attendance and success on the project. All work in the company is carried out according to the Agile methodology - a lot of communication, various meetings and rallies, including daily meetings, which you need to attend in person. The issue of combining with the main job is difficult. I would say this - it is possible to combine, but it is difficult and not advisable. Firstly, most of the daily events take place at lunchtime. Secondly, in addition to the tasks on the project, there are also lectures, with homework and tests based on these lectures. It’s quite difficult to keep up with all this, especially with your main job. The tasks on a project are completely different and depend on the project itself. Typically, student projects use fairly modern and popular technologies, for example: Java 8 / 11, Spring Core, Spring Boot, Spring Data, Hibernate, JUnit, databases. As I already said, the lab also hosts lectures in the main areas: Java 8, Spring, databases and multithreading. Each of these modules lasts about a month and a half, so if you don’t want to sit in a lab for half a year, you’ll have to master some of the technologies yourself. By the way, during the lab you need to take an English language assessment with a teacher. If they assign you a level below B1, they simply won’t make an offer, no matter how good a specialist you are from a technical point of view. The company is focused on foreign customers and knowledge of English is really important. If there are any gaps, I would advise taking the test as early as possible. If the level is below the required level, you will have the opportunity to enroll in courses from the company, improve your language skills and retake it at the end. In general, according to the rules, a retake is at least six months later, so it’s better to do well right away. But in theory, they can make an exception and allow you to retake it earlier. There is no fixed deadline for completing the lab; it is individual for everyone and depends on two factors: feedback from mentors on the project and readiness for a technical interview. The average period, according to my observations, is 4 months. Personally, I completed it in less than 3, but at the same time I spent 8-10 hours a day studying. Someone with me went through it in a month and a half, but this is a completely exceptional case. At the end of the internship you will receive a technical interview. It lasts 2 hours and asks about all the topics covered during the study, and, as a rule, they also give practical tasks on SQL / streaming. The interview is difficult and you need to prepare for it for a very long time. Career growth at Epama is quite fast - after half a year you can be promoted to middle. Therefore, they will require appropriate knowledge from you. Here is just a small list of topics that will definitely be asked in an interview: Spring (Core, Data JPA, MVC, AOP, Boot), Git, Java 8, SQL and databases (transaction isolation levels, indexes, normal forms, anomalies), Hibernate, Multithreading (from the basics to Concurrent collections, Completable Future and ForkJoinPool), CI/CD, JMM and so on. Before the new year, in order to get a job in the St. Petersburg office, it was enough to successfully pass an interview and have a level of English B1 or higher. Since then, the company's policy has changed and now they hire only the best and immediately for the project. When it appears, whether they will want to offer you there and whether you will be able to pass an interview with the customer is unknown and no one promises you anything. For my part, I would like to say that I have a generally positive impression of the company. It has well-established processes, feedback, cool, modern, comfortable offices for work, a lot of events for students, high requirements, but most importantly - practical experience, with which the chances of getting a job increase many times over. I successfully passed the lab, but could not get a job at Epam due to the current situation in the world and the lack of projects at the moment. However, with the knowledge I gained, I received several offers from other places without any problems and now work as a junior developer. Whether it's worth it is up to you to decide. If you have any questions, write in the comments, and thanks for reading 😉 It has well-established processes, feedback, cool, modern, comfortable offices for work, a lot of events for students, high requirements, but most importantly - practical experience, with which the chances of getting a job increase many times over. I successfully passed the lab, but could not get a job at Epam due to the current situation in the world and the lack of projects at the moment. However, with the knowledge I gained, I received several offers from other places without any problems and now work as a junior developer. Whether it's worth it is up to you to decide. If you have any questions, write in the comments, and thanks for reading 😉 It has well-established processes, feedback, cool, modern, comfortable offices for work, a lot of events for students, high requirements, but most importantly - practical experience, with which the chances of getting a job increase many times over. I successfully passed the lab, but could not get a job at Epam due to the current situation in the world and the lack of projects at the moment. However, with the knowledge I gained, I received several offers from other places without any problems and now work as a junior developer. Whether it's worth it is up to you to decide. If you have any questions, write in the comments, and thanks for reading 😉