Finally got around to describing my personal experience of entering the amazing and mysterious world of programming. I received an education in the field of high-voltage electric power, after university I worked in my specialty for five years, climbed the career ladder from an ordinary engineer to administrative positions, but this time was enough for me to be completely disillusioned with this field. Not because of her as such, but because of the total chaos, nepotism and corruption that reigned there. After much thought, I made a difficult decision and left my alma mater, went into catering, opened my own bar, put it on its feet, brought it to almost independent work that rarely required my intervention, and I was faced with the question: what to do next? It was on the eve of my thirtieth birthday. I must say that I have been interested in programming for a very long time. Even when I was working in the energy sector and never thought of leaving this field, I taught myself the basics of Python and wrote simple little programs. Just because it was interesting. But all these long years it was nothing more than a hobby, since for a thorough study I would need all my free time, and I had to earn a living from something. Yes, yes, I have heard many stories (and read them here) about how guys, in parallel with their main work, over the course of several months, independently studied programming and got jobs as juniors. I don’t know, perhaps these heroes are much smarter than me😊, because it took me quite a long time to master many topics. So, the starting conditions were as follows: - there is an interest in learning programming; - there is not quite regular and not quite stable income (oh, this small business in Russia 😊); - on average, there is more free time than if you worked a standard five-day week. Add to this that at that time three of my friends from the university had already left the energy sector and became programmers, having completed courses at the training center of the St. Petersburg branch of EPAM. In general, my choice was obvious 😊 I began to purposefully prepare for admission to the Epamov training center. On the advice of one of my friends, I began to take the Javarash course, while simultaneously watching all sorts of lectures and reading articles: those that were in the public domain. Now there will be small praises for this resource (this is sincere! The administrators of Javarash did not pay me! :)): Javarash is an awesome thing. When you are a complete beginner, it is very difficult to find materials that will present information in an accessible way for your level. Javarash is an almost unique case. Of course, some topics are not described here in the best possible way, but there is no ideal. In general, I am very grateful to Javarash that for objectively little money (look at the prices for all sorts of paid Java courses) they taught me the basics of the language in a way that I could understand and gave me a lot of practice. Often in the comments under some lessons I saw indignation from users like: “I read the lesson three times, didn’t understand anything, looked for information in third-party sources. What am I paying money for? Guys, a programmer is such a master of sports in googling. Either you are just learning, or you are a seasoned senior - you will always, always look for different information all over the Internet. It is rare to find a resource that contains all the information you need or understand. So it’s normal to google and read different sources on the same topic. Well, okay, back to the story. In total, in 4 months I reached and partially passed level 17 (yes, I’m not fast), and at the same time I studied English with a tutor. Yes, English is very important. Not only will any interview or job interview be at least partially in English, but the vast majority of the information you need for work is available only on English-language resources. At the 17th level of Javarash, I realized that I had covered the topics required to enter the training center, returned to level zero and began to repeat everything. And I sent an application to the training center. A couple of weeks later they called me and asked me to tell me about myself in English, then in Russian they asked me simple questions about types of sorting, access modifiers, OOP principles, data types, etc. and was invited to take the entrance exam. The exam consisted of three parts. The first is a test on a computer. Twenty tasks/questions on loops, sorting, working with strings, data collections, general questions on SQL, several questions on logic, an hour was given for everything. The second is a letter in English on a given topic, 150 words and 20 minutes. The third was an oral interview with a programmer from EPAM, the questions were again on sorting, memory devices in Java, the principle of operation of the garbage collector, OOP principles. After that, they sent me home with the promise that in a week they would send a letter with the verdict. After the happy letter, I was once again invited to the office for a conversation with the HR manager (or resource manager? I don’t know). There they again asked general questions from my biography: why did I choose Java, why programming in general, and asked me to tell in English the pros and cons of my previous profession. A couple of weeks later, evening courses on Java Core began, three times a week in the office. The courses lasted three and a half months and ended with a fairly difficult exam (based on OCA/OCP problems from Oracle), slightly less than half of the group passed the exam. Those who passed ended up in the second part of the training center, the so-called laboratory. This is a complete imitation of real work. EPAM has several internal projects on which laboratory students work. Everything there is real, according to the precepts of Scrum and Agile, like real programmers😊: teams consisting of developers, team lead, business analyst, testers, etc., daily meetings, Jira, tasks, code reviews, etc. Further. In parallel with work on the educational project, there are lectures on SQL, Spring, multithreading, Java 8 with homework. In general, the laboratory is full of rich and interesting events. I spent four months in the lab and passed the final interview - a two-hour conversation with two EPAM programmers. They asked about writing tests, data collections, detailed map structure, SOLID, ACID principles, Java 8 innovations, exceptions, we talked in detail about Spring. There were a lot of topics, most of which I can’t remember. There were two practical tasks - write a stream (with lambdas, of course) and a simple query to the database. Another week later I received a letter of happiness - an offer from Epam 😊 From registering on Javarash to signing an employment contract, 15 months passed, and at the age of 31 I became a programmer. Param-param-pam, that's it!
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