Now it's time for me to tell you about my success story. I can honestly admit that I never dreamed of becoming a developer. I never considered myself stupid, but I always thought that development was incredibly complex and beyond the control of my mind. I honestly studied at the university for 5 years, received a diploma and worked in retail. I was a salesman, rose to the rank of director, then developed as a manager, the volume of responsibility grew. I started getting acquainted with Java in 2018, but I didn’t have enough strength and motivation since my son was born and I decided to leave for a better-paid position. By the age of 26, I became a regional manager with a good salary for my region. I traveled a lot before the pandemic, toured Europe, but after the birth of my child I bought a house and could no longer get out because of the sucked routine, mortgage and other joys of adult life. During the pandemic, I worked from home for a year, and the amount of time I saved allowed me to get back to learning Java. For about six months, I upgraded myself to JavaRush out of interest, read Schildt, Eckel, as a hobby, but there was no complete picture. When I reached level 22, I thought that I was already good enough to go for interviews and began to respond to June’s vacancies. I have never been so mistaken. It’s very good that they didn’t call me for a technical interview, but just gave me a test task. Guys, here I realized what a bottom I am) In the test one, I had to create a REST service, attach a frontend and a database. I honestly tried to learn about Spring, DB and Vue in a short time before the deadline, but for some reason I couldn’t do it in a week. After such a slap in the face, I closed my resume and realized that things wouldn’t work that way. You don’t just have to devote 10 hours a week and do snakes for fun, but really work hard. I bought courses on Java on Udemy, drilled into Core, spent a lot of hours on multi-threading and streaming, and only after I was able to confidently answer a set of questions on Core did I move on to frameworks and databases. If anyone thinks that pure Java is interesting to anyone on the market, you are very mistaken. Be prepared for the fact that you will need to master Spring, Hibernate, PostgreSQL/MySQL and other Git, Maven/Gradle . It is advisable to understand what SOAP and REST are and their differences. Only after I more or less understood this did I begin to respond modestly. Here another mistake was discovered: do not hesitate to respond to anything at all. In the end, they took me to a place where the job description required a specialist with 3-6 years of experience, and the interview there was much more comfortable than to places where they were looking for a junior. I passed three technical ones and did one test, which I posted in my github. They didn’t take me there, but frankly, it wasn’t a particularly interesting place to work. The test was to write a simple soap service and test it. At the first interviewI was severely nervous, I was wildly ashamed of my incompetence, but this is normal and must be overcome. They let me write code remotely, review sections of the code, and so on. It was very interesting. The second interview is an extremely disgusting experience. The interviewer was very sensitive and tried to hurt me in every question, got to the bottom of the wording and so on. The questions were like: describe what the main method means and how to enter command line arguments. I said that the method takes an array of strings as input; the interviewer wanted to hear that they were entered separated by a space. After the interview, after analyzing, I realized that I answered quite adequately and there is no need to push myself. At the third interview, I was interviewed by the team lead and the head of the department; the interview lasted an hour and a half. Half an hour later they called me with feedback and the next day they sent me an offer. Now I’m working here on a probationary period: it’s wildly difficult, I feel like my brain might explode, but this is Java Enterpise, what’s there to do without it. What I want to advise: if you think that OOP is 4 definitions, you are very deeply mistaken. You need to understand polymorphism very well to get the hang of Spring. Know your worth, don’t go to work for food, don’t go to people like you from the second interview. If you are a switcher like me, don’t decide to take such a step if you don’t have a good cushion, at least for six months. I was lucky, I worked and studied at the same time. My salary has fallen, but my family will not need money at first, it’s psychologically comfortable for me too. Try to build at least one REST service and push it into your repository. I assure you that at two of the three technical interviews they looked at my GitHub repository, and at another one they probably looked at it too, but they just didn’t say. Dedicate time to it: then, when you come to work, knowing the Git will significantly ease your already severe headache. Know not just 2-3 teams, but work with branches, switch, add features, test - such a project will already raise you in the eyes of developers over 90% of other applicants. Let this project be a mess, but the main thing is that there is some progress in it. Well, if you have questions, I’ll try to answer in the comments)
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