Hi all! About a year ago, I felt it was time to move towards a job search. Much to my regret, I found that knowledge of Java SE is not enough even for the position of Intren, and my resume is not in great demand at all - only a couple of responses to responses in a month, and those are negative. Then, by chance, I stumbled upon Epam, a company that conducts free courses, and then, upon successful completion, offers an internship on real projects with further employment. There are quite a lot of ambiguous 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 note right away that everything described below applies specifically to St. Petersburg and specifically to the direction of Java. 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 training.ru website, where you can choose the direction of interest in your city, see the requirements and send an application for participation. In my case, it was Java Core training. The selection process for the 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, about your goals, motivation and tell you more about companies. Upon successful completion of these stages, you will receive an offer to take the training. Training is 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 the lectures depends on the lecturer, mostly they are middles / seniors from production, usually people are quite literate. In addition to lectures, there are homework assignments, the quality and timeliness of which is one of the criteria for the success of the course. In fact, in addition to level 25 on Javarush, I had some experience in developing my own, albeit not large, pet projects, therefore, the course was given to me quite easily - I already knew 80% of the information passed. The end of the training and the key criterion for the success of the passage in different cities is different. Somewhere, for example in Kyiv, this is a rather large final project in pure Java, with authorization, servlets and a database. As I was told, almost no one could successfully complete it, therefore, in St. Petersburg they abandoned it in favor of the final test based on certification from Oracle OCA / OCP (IMHO not the best way to test knowledge, but that is what it is). If you regularly attended classes, did your homework well and quickly, and passed the test well (or wrote a project), you get to the next stage - to the laboratory, and here the fun begins. Just want to say that the lab is not paid. Projects are not commercial, that is, the company does not receive profit for your work. And they teach you, spend resources and time of mentors on you. Therefore, no one will pay you. I did not come up with this, but the company thus argues its position. How fair such judgments - decide for yourself. Laba starts with a 3 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 UI, well, or a little more complicated, 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, in general, get used to it, feel more confident in the tasks of the main project. After presenting your project in front of your stream, mentors, lab management, and just people who are interested, a full-fledged study begins. Typically, the company is asked to dedicate at least 20 hours a week to the lab. In general, no one can oblige you to do anything, because you are not bound by any contractual relationship. 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 rallies, which you need to attend in person. The question of combining with the main work is complex. I would say this - it is possible to combine, but it is difficult and not desirable. First, most of the dailies take place at lunchtime. Secondly, in addition to the tasks on the project, there are also lectures, according to these lectures, homework assignments and tests. It’s quite difficult to keep up with all this, all the more so with the main work. Tasks on the 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 said, lectures are also held in the lab 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 the lab for half a year, you will have to master some of the technologies yourself. By the way, during the lab, you must pass an English language assessment with a teacher. If you are assigned a level below B1, then they simply will not 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 you to turn in as early as possible. If it determines the level below the required one, it will be possible to enroll in courses from the company, improve the language and retake it at the end. In general, according to the rules, a retake is at least half a year later, therefore, it’s better to do it right away. But in theory, they can make an exception and allow you to retake earlier. There is no fixed deadline for passing the lab, it is individual for everyone and depends on two factors: feedback from mentors from the project and readiness for a technical interview. The average period according to my observations is 4 months. Personally, I passed in less than 3, but at the same time I devoted 8-10 hours a day to studying. Someone with me passed for a month and a half, but this is a very exceptional case. At the end of the internship, a technical interview awaits you. It lasts 2 hours and asks on all topics covered during the study, as well as, as a rule, they give practical tasks on SQL / streams. The interview is difficult and it takes a very long time to prepare for it. Career growth in Epama is quite fast - in half a year you can rise to the middle. Therefore, relevant knowledge will be required from you. Here is just a small list of topics that are sure to 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 Basics to Concurrent Collections, Completable Future and ForkJoinPool), CI/CD, JMM and so on. Before the new year in the St. Petersburg office, it was enough to successfully pass an interview and have an English level of B1 or higher for employment. Since then, the company's policy has changed and now they take only the best and immediately to the project. When he appears, whether they want to offer you there and whether you can pass an interview with the customer is not known and no one promises you anything. For my part, I want to say that the company as a whole has a positive impression. 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 gained, I got several offers from other places without any problems and now I work as a junior developer. Is it worth it - you decide. If you have any questions, write in the comments, and thanks for reading 😉
Then, by chance, I stumbled upon Epam, a company that conducts free courses, and then, upon successful completion, offers an internship on real projects with further employment. There are quite a lot of ambiguous 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 note right away that everything described below applies specifically to St. Petersburg and specifically to the direction of Java. 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 training.ru website, where you can choose the direction of interest in your city, see the requirements and send an application for participation. In my case, it was Java Core training. The selection process for the 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, about your goals, motivation and tell you more about companies. Upon successful completion of these stages, you will receive an offer to take the training. Training is 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 the lectures depends on the lecturer, mostly they are middles / seniors from production, usually people are quite literate. In addition to lectures, there are homework assignments, the quality and timeliness of which is one of the criteria for the success of the course. In fact, in addition to level 25 on Javarush, I had some experience in developing my own, albeit not large, pet projects, therefore, the course was given to me quite easily - I already knew 80% of the information passed. The end of the training and the key criterion for the success of the passage in different cities is different. Somewhere, for example in Kyiv, this is a rather large final project in pure Java, with authorization, servlets and a database. As I was told, almost no one could successfully complete it, therefore, in St. Petersburg they abandoned it in favor of the final test based on certification from Oracle OCA / OCP (IMHO not the best way to test knowledge, but that is what it is). If you regularly attended classes, did your homework well and quickly, and passed the test well (or wrote a project), you get to the next stage - to the laboratory, and here the fun begins. Just want to say that the lab is not paid. Projects are not commercial, that is, the company does not receive profit for your work. And they teach you, spend resources and time of mentors on you. Therefore, no one will pay you. I did not come up with this, but the company thus argues its position. How fair such judgments - decide for yourself. Laba starts with a 3 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 UI, well, or a little more complicated, 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, in general, get used to it, feel more confident in the tasks of the main project. After presenting your project in front of your stream, mentors, lab management, and just people who are interested, a full-fledged study begins. Typically, the company is asked to dedicate at least 20 hours a week to the lab. In general, no one can oblige you to do anything, because you are not bound by any contractual relationship. 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 rallies, which you need to attend in person. The question of combining with the main work is complex. I would say this - it is possible to combine, but it is difficult and not desirable. First, most of the dailies take place at lunchtime. Secondly, in addition to the tasks on the project, there are also lectures, according to these lectures, homework assignments and tests. It’s quite difficult to keep up with all this, all the more so with the main work. Tasks on the 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 said, lectures are also held in the lab 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 the lab for half a year, you will have to master some of the technologies yourself. By the way, during the lab, you must pass an English language assessment with a teacher. If you are assigned a level below B1, then they simply will not 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 you to turn in as early as possible. If it determines the level below the required one, it will be possible to enroll in courses from the company, improve the language and retake it at the end. In general, according to the rules, a retake is at least half a year later, therefore, it’s better to do it right away. But in theory, they can make an exception and allow you to retake earlier. There is no fixed deadline for passing the lab, it is individual for everyone and depends on two factors: feedback from mentors from the project and readiness for a technical interview. The average period according to my observations is 4 months. Personally, I passed in less than 3, but at the same time I devoted 8-10 hours a day to studying. Someone with me passed for a month and a half, but this is a very exceptional case. At the end of the internship, a technical interview awaits you. It lasts 2 hours and asks on all topics covered during the study, as well as, as a rule, they give practical tasks on SQL / streams. The interview is difficult and it takes a very long time to prepare for it. Career growth in Epama is quite fast - in half a year you can rise to the middle. Therefore, relevant knowledge will be required from you. Here is just a small list of topics that are sure to 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 Basics to Concurrent Collections, Completable Future and ForkJoinPool), CI/CD, JMM and so on. Before the new year in the St. Petersburg office, it was enough to successfully pass an interview and have an English level of B1 or higher for employment. Since then, the company's policy has changed and now they take only the best and immediately to the project. When he appears, whether they want to offer you there and whether you can pass an interview with the customer is not known and no one promises you anything. 
For my part, I want to say that the company as a whole has a positive impression. 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 gained, I got several offers from other places without any problems and now I work as a junior developer. Is it worth it - you decide. If you have any questions, write in the comments, and thanks for reading 😉
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