The hunt for Java developers: how to grow professionally and become a desired goal

Two in this photo in a month changed their work to a cooler

student who only teaches Java, can get more in Moscow than the current developer. For example, in the Russian development center of Deutsche Bank, the scholarship fluctuates around 100 thousand rubles. per month - and you are just being taught for this money, work - then.

Demand for developers is growing by about 10-15 percent every year, and the base for education is failing. And the needs are growing, and the turnover is big: after all, at some point it turned out that Java allows the most industrial development of code.

So, now I will tell you what career options in Russia and abroad you have if you already know Java or, at least, you have a couple of months to switch to a new language and a new development environment. Abroad, by the way, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are actively hiring Java engineers specializing in backends. And we have Odnoklassniki, Deutsche Bank, Oracle, Luxoft, Sberbank Technologies, Azul and others. Come on, show what and how.

Examples

Amazon is a huge international company, and at the same time very flexible. If you remember, at first they sold books, then they almost bent on the bubble of the dotcoms, but they survived due to the sale of all kinds of shnyag. Then they began to sell everything to everyone, and abruptly left for IT, launching the first decent cloud. They have some of the coolest data centers, good infrastructure, their own CDN, robots in warehouses - yes you can imagine everything. Most importantly, they have the corporate standard Java, and there is a lot of it in the backend. There is no specialization, but working with big data and optimization experience can be a good plus in the interview.

Oracle- In general, there is a lot to do, the only company in the world that has the whole stack: its hardware, its OSes, its middleware and its final software. At the same time, interestingly, we have a large development center in St. Petersburg, specializing mainly in Java: out of 350 employees, about 200 are just Java developers. In particular, JDK, JVM, Java Embedded and Internet-of-Things. It is the second largest Java competency center in the world. Larger is only the central campus in California (Santa Clara). They are looking for people who are interested in developing those only in Java, but also in making Java technology itself, since it is they who, in essence, determine the future of the language and development environment.

AzulIs a manufacturer of high-performance Java machines. Small company, less than 100 people. And it’s especially cool that there is a development office in St. Petersburg where Zing and Zulu are working. They are looking for cool JVM-specialists in their office in St. Petersburg.

Classmates- 95% of all their software is written in Java. There are less than a hundred developers there, in all three offices (St. Petersburg, Moscow, Riga) about 300 people work. That is, a very small company compared to Facebook or Twitter, but at the same time doing one of the most heavily loaded projects in the world. They are actively contributing to OpenSource, primarily in Cassandra and JDK. They use a bunch of performance optimizations, and sometimes patches OpenJDK, Cassandra and Lucene / Solr themselves and put such patched versions into production, because there is no time to wait until the patches pour into the main branch. They are actively looking for specialists in their offices in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Core Java, BigData, Highload. No Java EE. If you are in another city and smoke a topic well, they will organize a move with all the details.

Deutsche bank- The largest division of the world's largest banking conglomerate. Tasks are associated both with huge amounts of data for online transactions (quotes), and for analytical processing (terabytes of data for financial instruments). They are actively looking for specialists from their development centers in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Take from the regions, relocate. There is a very good training program.

Another of the banks is worth noting Sberbank-Technology - a structural unit of Sberbank, largely thanks to which Sberkassa became decent and technologically advanced. They love to make products with a human face, in fact - they arrange a kind of IT revival of a large company, as it used to be at IBM. Actively looking for Java-specialists in their offices in St. Petersburg, Moscow and Minsk.

Luxoft- the largest outsourcer. Actively looking for specialists in their offices in St. Petersburg, Moscow and many other cities. Relocate from other cities. Many different projects, mainly Enterprise Java (Java EE, Hibernate, Spring).

Of the major players, Twitter is also worth mentioning - they have their own storage system, a lot of Scala, a lot of Big Data, a lot of deception over optimizations and a hardcore backend. Actively contributing to OpenJDK. LinkedIn is actively hunting high-level Java developers, but what specifics I can’t say for sure. And of course, Facebook . Despite all the claims, PHP is there only on the frontends, and on the backends there is a lot of Java, and judging by their frantic headhunting activity, a lot of architectural problems;)

And of those who almost all Javists know - there are JetBrains with offices in St. Petersburg, Prague and Munich. These are right at the root of the whole tuning and do-it-yourself determine how the work with a live IDE will look. From foreign ones, there is Eclipse, but they are, in fact, a strange lotion to IBM, so along with all the charms of technology, you will get all the “charms” of working in a company of half a million people.

Stop, do not rush to submit a resume!

The first idea, of course, is to knock on these wonderful people and offer yourself a job. If you are sure that you know their technology stack and have the appropriate experience - yes, that will be a good thought. If not, you will first need to tighten the training a bit.

And here you are in for an unpleasant surprise.

The fact is that Java learning as such is not in Russia. Yes, there are several universities like MEPhI or Moscow State University, which have long switched in their courses to modern development tools. But they release, in fact, newcomers with no experience. There was almost no centralized transition to Java, and this is natural. They teach programming how anyone knows how. In general, there are strong specialized faculties in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan, and Novosibirsk.

What to do then?

The traditional path, of course, opensource - this is experience in teamwork, a good portfolio, and beautiful code that can be shown. The second option is different hackathons, which give a quick assessment of knowledge and show where to look. The third option, my favorite one, is to listen to experts who solve specific problems in specific companies and absorb knowledge.

That is why I restored from the ashes JUG.ru (Russian Java User Group). And that is why a couple of years ago I decided to make a Java conference to replace the Java Day and JavaOne Russia that left. But not just a conference, but one so that the speakers are only hardcore, so that the backend prevails, so that all are practitioners directly related to the development of large projects. And so no "how to do your business on the Internet."

The first time was not bad, the second - good, the third - very cool. In short, we will have another such conference in St. Petersburg soon: for example, there will be 6 reports from Oracle, 2 hardcore JVM engineers from Azul, three reports about the frantic Highload from the crazy team of Odnoklassniki, a few Enterprise hardcore from Luxoft, reports from engineers of Deutsche Bank , JetBrains, Red Hat, SAP and others.

What does a normal level look like?

Look at what top freelancers write in their profiles and pay attention to the emphasis on specific technologies. If you do not have three-letter words in your resume, most likely you will not find a really sweet job - everyone now needs a narrow specific experience.

So, first, emphasis on practice:

I have more than 2 years of experience as Java developer and 2 years of experience as C developer. Also I was involved in high performance computing programming. One of my achievements is an algorithm for optimization of files distribution inside network implemented using MPI technology. I'm very motivated in increasing my skills in security information and network technologies. On other hand, I am a active user and contributor of Gentoo Linux. As a result I have skills in python and shell scrip ...

Second, emphasis on a specific area:

Seasoned developer with more than 16 years of experience with various development technologies (C ++ / Java / C # / Scala / Python etc.). Have been working in investment banking for a number of years, doing algo trading / electronic trading. Have acquired considerable business knowledge in finance (equities, futures, FIX etc). Have experience with both server side and client side (Java, C # / WPF, QT) and web development. I speak English, Russian and Hebrew fluently. I know basic Spanish as well, which ...

There are also examples of portfolios without specialization: people can afford to write this, knowing that they have a high rating. Plus, outsourcing a lot of tasks is solved precisely by the “general plan”:
Third:

Leadership: At most three years of development team (from 3 to 6 person) leadership and technical account management.
Problem-solving: Ability to recognize and define problems, invents and implements solutions, track and evaluates results.
Creative thinking: New approaches to problem-solving, organizational design, and product development all spring from the individual capacity for creative thinking. 6+ years of experience.

Do not think that something like this will ride in real life when you look for a place to work. I repeat, general things are good in freelance, but really high salaries and good projects begin when you enter the hundred of the best in the country by specific technology. And you can only learn effectively in practice. To get this practice, you need to understand what tasks someone solves - and immediately focus on the most interesting to you.

Career

If now you live in the region and get about 50-70 thousand rubles, then the first thing to do is to understand where you should develop. Learning Java “in isolation” from a specific goal does not make sense. First you need to scoop up experience: participating in a conference or connecting online, asking friends from development, talking on forums, reading blogs of experts in the field. The first task appears - to get a job in Moscow or Peter in a specific company.

Here the main question is why to Moscow or Petersburg. The fact is that in the region you get, say, 70 thousand rubles. In Moscow, for this you will receive 150, in St. Petersburg 120. At the same time, minus the apartment and more expensive food - but still you are in the black. It is very easy to start abroad from our Petersburg, so the second priority after Java is good English. Or German, for example.

My suggestion

I understand that you no longer have time to fit into the conference in St. Petersburg, and, in general, it may not be very necessary for you, of course. And we have already gathered a quorum, to be honest. Therefore, we sell electronic tickets for online broadcasting (and the last two times they went very well, only when one of the video channels fell for 10 minutes, I was flooded with letters like in a good land attack).

With this ticket you can see all the reports online. Yes, the price tag is not the lowest, but, believe me, I know what I sell, and it's worth it.

The most important thing: I don’t like it - I will return the money according to the first letter without question, even if you have already looked.

Here is our conference: right on the main page there is a list of reports with abstracts .
Here you can buy access -http://jugru.timepad.ru/event/136541/ .
Here is a report from the past .
Here are the open videos a year ago .

I believe that we are doing a cool job, and I know how much positive was at previous conferences.

And this time we will try to make it even cooler.