Hi all. The idea arose to share my success story with the JR community. Perhaps she will push someone to achieve what they want, just as other success stories pushed me at one time. I’ll tell you about my background to give an idea and background. My interest in programming arose around the ninth grade of school. Then, purely out of interest, I bought paper books on C, C++, Java, SQL, TCP/IP network architecture, etc. I tried to type up simple pages. A hobby that was fun to spend time with. There was also Pascal at school. I was very good at solving problems. And even once he took part in a regional Olympiad, where he took third place. Release. After finishing school, my parents sent me to study in England. It’s not that I wanted it or asked for it, but my parents wanted to give me a more promising future. The first course is common for overseas students to make up for the difference in preparation between foreigners and English students. And then three years of training in the specialty. I chose the specialty Information Technology & Marketing - joint course. The first course went well. On the second I hardly studied and dropped out. Why? At that time I was still a green fool with the wind in his head. There were no specific goals, or even a distant vision of what I would like to achieve in life. Why strain if you don’t have to stress?) And soon he returned back to Ukraine. Return. When I returned, I worked in a warehouse for a year because it was too late to apply to a local university. Plus, you had to pass an English exam to get admitted. Even though the work was in a warehouse, it cleared my mind a little, because before that I had never worked anywhere for a day. Enrolled in applied mathematics. Study at a local university. Here, after England, of course there was a shock. How low-quality the education is, how many superfluous and unnecessary subjects that are general education, but which generally do not bother anyone as future specialists. For example, cultural studies, or physical education, running across a field in the winter in the frost, when it is covered with snow, and playing football 😀 At the faculty, in computer science classes, there are pot-bellied monitors, with ancient, glitchy and wildly slow computers. In general, I didn’t like studying, and my student years were years of despair and depression, I would like it all to end as soon as possible. When I had already gained some sense, and most importantly, had something to compare with, I realized what I had lost in England, but it was already too late. Ending. Here I understand that there is a huge difference between what was taught at university and what a real employer wants. You won’t be able to get a job right away. Also, parents stop giving money for needs and the time has come to earn it yourself. Like, you’re already healthy, it’s high time, go and work. Search. I started looking for ways to make money. I looked through a large variety of jobs, but as a rule I never stayed anywhere longer than three months. The salary and attitude were so-so, the work was uninteresting, and the thought that I would have to live with incomprehensible and unfulfilling work for the rest of my life was killing me. Then I pulled myself together and started looking for hundreds, if not thousands of vacancies. One of the more promising, better paid and interesting activities was English-speaking customer support. People with knowledge of the language are paid not much more, but more. The level of English without use began to deteriorate greatly, so I began to improve myself in this regard. Hours a day. My brain was grinding like a burning hard drive, but I knew that it was necessary :) For a while I even liked it, and I was glad that there was progress and I was not standing still. But there were a lot of BUTs. The schedule is flexible - variable shifts, including nights and variable weekends. The work quickly became routine. The hassle when working with clients is serious. The effort and time spent did not pay off. Experience in customer support for about two years. I pushed myself again and found a job as a dispatcher. Not the taxi dispatcher, but the Logistics Coordinator / Dispatcher for the states. Drive trucks across the states and organize cargo transportation, communicating by phone and email with native speakers and drivers. English was no longer needed for intermediate / upper-intermediate, but advanced. Here, past experience in customer support, experience with English and communication experience helped me a lot with this. My communication skills have improved dramatically, otherwise I simply would not have been able to do such a complex and stressful job. Here, after all the torment and suffering, I finally felt the taste of freedom. The average amount of money was $1k, and with increasing experience and/or in good months $1.2k - $1.5k. I started traveling and going to restaurants. With the help of my parents, we bought an apartment and renovated it. In general, I finally began to enjoy life. But even here the barrel organ played joyfully for a short time. The work schedule is from 14:00 to 00:00 (adjustment to the time zone of the states), but in fact it’s an hour to get to work and usually work until the first or second hour of the morning, and go to bed on average at 03:00. Scrape out of bed at about 11 am, take a couple of hours to come to your senses, have breakfast and go back to work. Plus, you have a social disadvantage on weekdays, because everyone works in the morning, and you work in the evenings. And from Monday to Friday you see nothing but work. Over time, after more than a year, the work becomes more and more routine and less and less interesting. In a year, or in five, it would be about the same. Like Groundhog Day. And the time came when I warned a month and a half in advance that I would be leaving so that they could find a replacement for me. Finding a replacement for me was not so easy, and on the horizon they wanted to make me a manager with one and a half times the rate, that is, half more than what it was, and I was one of the key employees. He even taught beginners. And literally two weeks after my resignation letter camequarantine ... The transportation market in the states has dropped very much. Work 12-14 hours a day under extreme pressure. They immediately offered to increase my salary by 40% so that I wouldn’t leave and they didn’t want to let me go. I was already counting the days until the end of April would come and I could quit my job with great relief. I was in a half-dead state, and the damage to my mental health, and worst of all, to my relationships with loved ones, was not worth any money. Experience as Logistics Coordinator/Dispatcher for almost two years. Now, in fact, I’ll tell you about JavaRush and its fate in this whole story. Back in July 2019, long before my dismissal (end of April 2020), when my nerves were once again exhausted at work until I had a headache, I realized that sooner or later I would become a programmer. This is something I really enjoy from an early age. And where there are good working conditions, and where they pay good money to experienced specialists. First of all, I wanted to dispel doubts that I would succeed. Statistically, a lot of people give up before reaching their final goal. Sometimes even stretching out the training for years. And JavaRush helped me with this. I began to get excited, spend days and hours reading success stories, learning about people’s backgrounds and how they finally became programmers. I singled out one critically important pattern for myself. There are those who considered themselves “stupid” and far from programming, like people in working professions. There are people over 40 with families and children who are too late (not) to change their profession and need stability. There are people who found the initial levels difficult and stopped learning for months. All of them have one thing in common. No one abandoned their studies or gave up halfway, no matter how impossible it might seem. Therefore, it is only a matter of time! If these people could do it, then why can’t I, with the talent and specialized education I have for programming? Hundreds of times I analyzed everything and thought through it down to the smallest detail, weighed all the pros and cons, and also took into account the circumstances and risks. Having dispelled my doubts and gained confidence, almost a month after my last job I started taking a course on JavaRush. I even wrote down time lines on paper so that I wouldn’t forget: - level 0, May 22, 2020 - start day - level 10, June 2, 2020 - level 20, June 25, 2020 - level 30, July 23, 2020 I was also sick for a week. Not because of the coronavirus, but because I drank a glass of ice water in the heat and my temperature rose sharply :) I also took a week of vacation and went to the sea. Rest was vital, after my previous job, strict quarantine and post-apocalyptic environment, plus intensive training, my head was a hell of a mess. Refreshed, rebooted, came back. - August 17, 2020 First test technical task. At that time, I reached JR level 36, gained confidence and began to selectively send my resume. An offer came to do a task. Without any interview, response by email. I started making it, did it... I did the part that concerns Java. There was also a front-end part. But not just HTML/CSS, but with JavaScript, about which not a word was said in the vacancy. I already understood this when the test task was already in progress, and I also realized that this was actually a full-stack vacancy, and not purely Java. And the money offered there was ridiculous, 3000 UAH (~$110) during the probationary period, $300 after the probationary period. I realized that something was fishy here, the demands were too big and unclear for a small salary, and I abandoned this task. In the meantime, an internship at JavaRush soon became available. Signed up for it. I completed the assignment for enrollment in a day and a half (around the end of August). Before the internship began, we had to wait until the beginning of October, plus three months of the internship, and already the New Year, holidays, too long. By that time, the reserves of money had almost run out and there was no such luxury as just waiting... There was a choice, either get a part-time job for half a day (for any job) so that you had something to live on, and do a JR internship in your free time. Or borrow some money and devote all possible time to intensive study. I chose the second option. Yes, it was a riskier option. I read and know on JR and not only how much competition there is for the position of newcomers without experience, how they ignore resumes and kick back left and right for months on end. Some even spend six months or more looking for their first job. But I was determined and consciously understood what I was signing up for. After the first tech. tasks switched to Spring, SQL, Git, Maven and other necessary basic things and suspended training. Priorities have changed. I studied Spring in the course Spring Framework 5: Beginner to Guru by John Thompson on udemy.com. An excellent storehouse of knowledge, high-quality presentation of material, simple and accessible, for only 10 bucks. SQL - tutorials on YouTube and articles on the Internet. Didn't delve deeply. Had an idea of basic things and a minimum of practical experience. Git - read the book, which is available on the official Git website. It helped to understand how git works, what it is and what it is used for, but the commands in the console were almost not useful and I almost forgot them by the current Maven - if you are not DevOps, then you don’t need to delve deeply, a basic understanding is enough, at least for a beginner. The JR team also helped compile the resume, for which we thank them. This helped because: - September 12, 2020, first interview with HR By the way, in order to get to the interview with HR, it was necessary to do a very difficult test task. Pure Java, Swing window application and algorithms. I did it for four days, from early morning until late evening (!) I cursed because a lot of things didn’t work out, I Googled a lot, but in the end at five in the morning I finally finished it, uploaded it to GItHub and sent an email. The interview with HR was successful, so the next step is: - September 21, 2020, first technical interview I prepared for it very diligently and thoroughly. I read lists of questions on the Internet, memorized them and analyzed them in pure Java. I answered the first half of the questions on pure Java perfectly. And the second part of the questions was about Spring and SQL, which I didn’t prepare for because I didn’t expect them 😀 And I answered the second part of the questions, in my opinion, so-so, and was almost sure that I failed the interview. But that was not the case... Tech. The interview was on Monday. They told me to wait for the results on Friday because there were other candidates. And imagine my surprise when the very next day, Tuesday, HR contacted me again! Discuss issues related to the vacancy and whether the project would be interesting to me. So that from the first interview, with huge competition, without experience, they would hire me? Yes, of course, right now... However: - September 28, 2020, first Job Offer It was a Java Trainee position with a salary of $200, and $500 after passing the probationary period. If you consider that the probationary period included a training program where you will improve the knowledge needed for the project, under the supervision of an experienced mentor, then it’s quite good. It’s not free, and that’s good, although I would agree to it for free just to gain experience in a real environment. - October 5, 2020, first working day. I also learned JavaScript in a week according to the training program, because it was necessary for the project. After Java with frameworks, it seemed relatively simple to me, although it also has many of its own nuances. At first I swore a lot and often in JS, not understanding why something doesn’t work when the code is simple and should work) I improved my knowledge of other technologies, such as Spring Security (also a course from my uncle John Thompson), Hibernate, Apache Tiles ( compose a web page from different JSPs), Apache POI (Excel generation), JSTL and other words that are scary for a beginner. Also came JavaScript libraries like jQuery, datatables, OpenLayers. And later the first simple, but real working tasks began... At first, for the first month, you don’t understand what’s happening at all. The first three months you feel stupid and gradually get into the project. After more than three months, there is some confidence that you understand what and why you are doing... - January 17, 2021 Successful completion of the probationary period. - May 2021 The “now” moment at the time of writing. Almost 9 months of work experience. They are satisfied with the quality of my work; I usually fit into the estimate or finish tasks before the estimate. You already have full confidence in your abilities. The work is interesting and enjoyable, and the tasks are very diverse, every day there is something new and there is room to move forward. There is an interest in taking additional online courses to upgrade your skills and improve your qualifications. In less than two months there will be a re-examination of my performance and an increase in salary. Result If we exclude from the timeline the week when I was sick and the week of vacation, then in total it took 4 months to get my first job, from the start of training from zero level to the first working day. The entire described time period covers 15 years, from 2006 to 2021. Study mode: At first I decided to organize a marathon and study 7 days a week in order to reduce the time required to complete the course and find a job faster. But without rest, efficiency drops significantly. Therefore, I studied as I went to work, from 10 am to about 8 pm, +- 8 hours of study with breaks for rest and lunch, from Monday to Friday. In addition to programming as such, which is already difficult and requires a lot of mental effort, there are still many aspects of self-organization and self-discipline. This is also a critical factor that must be taken into account in order for the picture to form a coherent whole. Training without the above will either not work or will be ineffective / will take a long time. Organization and discipline without proper training are also unlikely to produce results. Those dissatisfied with the JavaRush course will always be able to find fault with the quality of the material and the validator. For me personally, this is a valuable resource for affordable money, which I chose after analyzing many offers of offline and online courses. And which helped to achieve what I wanted. Without JR and also his community, this would have been much longer, harder and more difficult to do. So, thanks to the developers of this resource, and everyone who takes part. This has already been said somewhere, but the main thing is not to give up and everything will work out.
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