How young professionals get a job in an IT company

Once, colleagues from the HR i-Free department asked me to write a short article for young professionals who are seeking to get an IT company. The reasons that prompted them to do this are generally understandable: in the company, the main employer of the young specialists is the department under my management, we take the guys (and sometimes the last-year students) who have just graduated from the university, and they take a certain “young fighter” course with us.
Naturally, I do not pretend to be objective, but just want to give some advice for those who want to start their journey with work in an IT company. The article expresses my purely opinion on how to hire a young specialist, and I really hope that this short opus will help some of the senior students in my future career.
In general, those who are interested, I ask for a cat.


As a small preamble: who I am and what I do. My name is Ilya, and inside i-Free I play many roles, one of which is to lead a monitoring and technical support team. And no, this is not a call center, we are not engaged in this kind of customer support, our main function is to ensure the smooth operation of our services and, as a result, to provide our customers with the highest quality services. For this, our company has its own monitoring system (based on a third-party Zabbix monitoring system), which, based on tens of thousands of metrics, makes a decision on the serviceability / inoperability of a particular service. Naturally, the system itself is like a spherical horse in a vacuum, and here the monitoring engineers come into play,

It is worthwhile to realize that the monitoring engineer is only the first (or rather one of the possible) steps in the IT career. And inside i-Free, there’s an established process for training and upgrading monitoring engineers to the next stage. Actually, during my work, people from the monitoring team have grown to highly qualified specialists in all IT fields, such as development, testing, administration, technical expertise and analysis. Working in a large company and being in the process of exchanging professional knowledge, each of the newcomers can choose for themselves the further development path. Without going into details of the process of training and advanced training (since this in itself draws to a separate full-fledged article, or even two), I want to note one nuance: new people are constantly needed in the monitoring group,

Based on my many years of experience, I would like to give some useful (I hope) tips.

How to create a resume. Here the recommendation is simple: google + search query "how to create a resume" to help. There already smart people painted and explained everything a thousand times. But I will dwell separately on the next subparagraph.

WHAT to write in the resume to the beginner. If for a person with ten years of experience the main problem in compiling a resume is to highlight the most important thing in order to invest in a document format, then for a senior student the question is what to write (and most importantly, not to write) in the resume, it rises to the full extent, since a typical senior student, technical knowledge in IT is purely university, that is, for the most part theoretical.

Here you can recommend a few points:

• Do not write what you do not know. Having heard the set of words “Java, OOP” or “mongo, fashionable, stylish, youth”, do not rush to write these words in a resume. They will certainly ask you about them, and if you can’t show at least basic knowledge of the subject, you will immediately spoil your opinion of yourself.
• Indicate the level of your knowledge. For example, after studying at C # University, do not hesitate to write something in brackets: “I wrote a calculator and a small game in the framework of a university program.”
• If there was a side job in the IT field, even unofficial, feel free to include it in your resume. For the employer, this can be interesting. We always look at it.
• By analogy: if you tried to develop at home in the IT field outside the university framework, then feel free to write this in a resume. For example, the experience of raising linux + apache to deploy your own site is worthy of being entered in the resume of a young specialist.

Finally, a resume has been compiled and sent to all interesting places. Then, with a high degree of probability, the next stage will occur: a telephone conversation with a company recruiter. Everything is quite simple here, if the call is received, it is most likely that your prospective manager looked at your resume and confirmed his desire to talk with you. Therefore, the recruiter calls you with two goals: to check your adequacy and make an appointment. So don’t give up and be yourself. Technical questions are unlikely to be asked at this stage. I note that although the described scenario, although typical, there may be differences, for example, several telephone interviews, including technical, as each company creates its own process of hiring people who are most effective for them.

Here came the day of the interview, and you are going to meet with your potential leader. An important, albeit banal point: do not be late, it is better to come in advance. To be late, in principle, is not very polite, and a young specialist is not particularly recommended.
So, you arrived at the meeting, the recruiter took you to the meeting room, and there they are already waiting for you. And here we come close to the question: "how to behave in an interview?"

So it is tempting to say, “do not worry,” but this is heresy. Excitement is normal. Interviewing is a certain kind of psychological stress, and the excitement will definitely be. But no matter how trite it may sound, try to cope with your excitement. Although, if you can’t do it, then it’s okay, on the other hand there are people who also used to be young specialists, and they still remember how it was. But remember that the more people you interview, the harder it will be for you. A few tips from a personal interview practice:

• If you are worried or shy, and this bothers you, then ask your interlocutors to give you a couple of minutes to calm down. They will certainly give you such an opportunity, maybe they will treat you to coffee and ask something abstract: the purpose of the interview is to check your knowledge and potential, but not to drive you into a psychological hole.
• Do not say what you do not know. Even if you know how to say it convincingly, do not do it.
• Do not be too lazy to find out about the company before the interview. Visit their site, read the wiki, look at articles on Habré, google.
• Do not forget to agree on subtle issues like salary, probationary period, possible increases immediately, at an interview. Do not postpone this for later. Important for students: be sure to discuss your study schedule for an interview! Sometimes a potential employer may forget about it.
• Before the interview, you need to pump up general IT erudition.

I will dwell on the last point in more detail. What do I put in this phrase? IT erudition is a certain basic set of knowledge and terms that any self-respecting IT specialist should have. Below is a list of what you should have an idea about:

• Basic terminology: transactions, indexes, etc.
• Operating Systems. Remember that not only the Windows family exists, but also Unix-like systems.
• File systems. There is a whole bunch of file systems under each OS family, it is worth understanding how each of them differs from the other.
• In Network Theory: Understanding the Four-Level TCP / IP Model. Knowledge of the transport protocols TCP and UDP, and how they are globally different from each other and for what purposes each of them is applicable.
• In the field of development: Principles of OOP. Examples of languages ​​built on these principles. What are functional programming languages, and what are procedural programming languages. Examples are also good to remember.
• Understanding the functioning of object-relational (SQL) databases.
• But it is also worth remembering the existence of NoSQL databases. And at least theoretically know about their pros and cons.

If I forgot something, then please correct me in the comments, be sure to edit the list.

A few words about how usually an interview is held for the position of engineer of a monitoring and technical support group. The interview is carried out by three of them: HR recruiter, leading engineer or team leader, technical specialist. Questions are mainly asked in those areas of knowledge that are indicated in the resume, since for us the potential of the applicant is important in the first place, and not his knowledge. When checking, emphasis is placed on the assessment of the learning ability of a young specialist. If he is a diligent student, then first of all they ask what they give at the university, if he is a self-taught practitioner, then they ask practical questions. And at the very end, a logical task is necessarily given, for the solution of which no specific knowledge is required, and the “triad” necessarily looks at how this problem is solved.
In principle, when hiring students and graduates, we first of all look at his potential, that is, how good a specialist he can become a prospect, and not what he knows now. Because we can always teach, the benefit of the training and knowledge testing processes in the i-Free monitoring group has been built for a long time
And finally, if you were refused! This is not a big deal, just because you were denied does not mean that you are bad or that you have no future in this area! Not on your nelly! Each company is guided by its own principles when hiring employees, and each leader operates with some of his own criteria, which may change over time. Ask recruiters to talk about mistakes during the interview, which areas of knowledge should be pulled up. This will help in future interviews. Well, there are nuances associated with the goals of the employer. For example, once we refused an excellent job applicant only because he was overqualified, because after six months of work we would not be able to provide him with the necessary level of motivation.
Good luck friends! You will succeed! And with questions, welcome to comment.