Hi all! My name is Varvara, and recently I finally completed my probationary period as a big data June at Epam. I want to share how I got to this point and how javarush helped me with this)) First, about my initial data. I am 32 years old. I wanted to become a programmer while still in the 9th grade, and even chose a specialty at university - applied mathematics and computer science. But low self-esteem took over and I was simply afraid to go there, thinking that I wouldn’t be able to cope with my studies ((In the end, I went to study to become a programmer - for a second degree. As a result, I got the top two - mathematical methods in economics (full-time) and automated systems management (correspondence). I studied in Samara, at Aerokos, and we wrote in Delphi))) Immediately after university, for some reason I went to graduate school, although I didn’t really want to. Three years later she defended her PhD, and after that she worked as a university teacher for another six years: she taught vyshmat and all sorts of “near-IT” disciplines. During this time, I wrote a pet project - in bash, tex and python, coded some small scripts in R, but I didn’t think about programming as a profession at all: I remembered that it was hard for me to learn, and it always seemed that there was not enough for this brain... In 2019, I was finally fed up with what was going on in our higher education, and I decided that it was time to “get out,” especially since I never felt like a “teacher by vocation.” My initial plan was to try myself in data science, since in my “scientific” activity I worked on mathematical models for socio-economic data. I thought that there was some kind of foundation in mathematics, but I couldn’t become a programmer, I couldn’t do it))), so I rolled up my sleeves and started studying. In three months, I completed the Yandex specialization in machine learning on the courser and after that I left the university. My boyfriend (by the way, here is his success story) offered to move from Samara to St. Petersburg, which we did in November 2019, and since that time I have not worked. The original plan was to go through interviews like the Junes - the date of the Satanists. For two months I simultaneously studied at mlcourse.ai and applied for vacancies. There were very few Junes in general. More often than not, they simply didn’t answer me, in some cases they refused me, but they never called me in for an interview at all. Honestly, I gave up. Now I already understand that, in general, I knew little then, having just completed an online specialization, and most importantly, I had no experience in commercial development, and without it there is no way. My boyfriend advised me to forget about data science and go into development. We sat and thought and decided that he already had experience getting into IT with javarush, and I should try the same. So, to welcome 2020, I first sat down with cs50, and then started taking the javarush course. At the same time, my boyfriend told me about a Java course at Epam that I could take for experience. I applied on their website. Around week 11 of my javarush training, I received a call for a phone interview. If it weren’t for cs50, I wouldn’t have passed it: they asked what data structures you know, what a stack and a queue are, what an overflow stack is, about sorting methods, and something very basic about Java, from the series what kind of loops and how would you write an infinite loop. Then there was a non-technical part where you had to answer in English - asking what you know about Epam))) Somehow I got out of it. It seemed like there were some other general questions about myself. After 10 minutes of telephone conversation, I was quite stressed: only they ask you in Russian about the overflow stack and then - what do you know about Epam))) In short, they called me for the second stage - an in-person interview. First there was a written exam in English for 40 minutes: I had to write a letter to a friend who seemed to have taken Epam courses with a request for advice on something about studying. Then there was a computer test: you had to write code in a notepad. cs50 helped again: there were sorting problems, questions about the complexity of algorithms, tricky loop problems, one question each on sql and http. After the test there was a face-to-face interview, where they asked for 40 minutes what you know about java core. At that time I was only at level 18 in javarush. We talked about the principles of OOP, interfaces and abstract classes, collections, multithreading - in a word, I had to tell you everything that I had learned up to this point. Gone. The third stage is an interview with HR. There they asked about motivation, background, and again the conversation was in English - some nasty psychological questions. Have taken! Due to the pandemic, the courses themselves were online, twice a week for an hour and a half in the evening, for three months. By the time the courses started, I had already reached about level 30 in javarush. The lecturer droned on stupidly, it was painful to listen to, I knew all the topics except Java EE, spring and jdbc. As homework, they gave me all the Java problems from hackerrank and codingbat, as well as a pet project for implementing CRUDs in spring. I had to move into spring on my own in two weeks. I also had to go through the OCA and OCP books and prepare for the final exam for the courses - it was based on these tests. They are terribly disgusting! I passed again, and they took me to the Epam laboratory. This is where I was really happy, because after the lab it seemed easier to find a job, because this was already experience, albeit on a training project. For those who don’t know: a lab is 8 hours of unpaid work-study a day, five days a week, for a minimum of 3 months. You can spend fewer hours a day, but it will all take longer. In the lab, almost immediately there was a call-meeting with a representative of the big data project, who invited the students of the java laboratory. I thought - why not))) There was social security again: mostly java core and a few logic puzzles. They took me. The condition for graduating from the lab was the completion of an introductory training course on bigdata - this course was made by Epam himself, and it is in English: there are videos, homework and tests, as well as three conversations with a mentor. I completed the course in about a month and a half: it included Hadoop, Spark, Hive, Kafka, Elasticsearch. Homework in Java and Scala. In parallel - an educational project, in spring - a backend, and in Python - a big data part. That's how I ended up with three languages instead of one)) Exactly four months after joining the lab, I was scheduled for an interview. The interview was a “talk and touch” interview. They asked everything - about myself, what I did, what pet projects there were, what interesting tasks I did on a school project, a little about Java and a big data course. The worst of all were the questions about Scrum and Agile - I don’t know anything about them)) In short, my nerves went away after this, but in the evening I saw in the mail an offer from the big data unit Epam. After being hired, as a condition of my probationary period, I had to take a second course on bigdata - the same topics, only deeper, and nifi, streamsets, nosql, Jenkins, airflow were added. I understand that there are a lot of letters, I will try to briefly summarize: 1. I have been studying non-stop since July 2019 (except for weekends)), and have not worked for a total of 11 months. 2. If you take away the failure with data science, then the path to IT took me 10 months. 3. A must-have for me when passing through Epam is cs50, some courses in sql (Schultheis on Steppe, for example), javarush (I eventually reached level 38, the rest I just opened), spring (the ripper Borisov, and Alishev on YouTube), strong English (I have B2). 4. For June big date direction you need Java, and knowledge with javarush is almost enough for this (you also need java 8), and Scala, Python - initially, they will teach you along the way. 5. The difficult moments were: mastering git - I had no experience with it, docker, kubernetes and in general the whole ci/cd procedure - when you simply don’t know about it, you don’t understand what to Google. 6. It was difficult to say to yourself: “You can do it!”, to believe in it and continue to plow. It was also difficult to leave a government structure for a commercial one - consider I have never had market interviews (employment at regional universities = dating, and no one is interested in your level of knowledge, alas), and the stress was great for me. I wish everyone who has embarked on the path to “enter IT” self-confidence - you will succeed if you don’t give up and study regularly.
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