Java programmer in St. Petersburg. Overview of the labor market from the perspective of the applicant. Part 2/3. Pitfalls for the "beginner"

Part 1/3. What are the 'buns'.
Part 3/3. What are the employers. Characteristics.

Pitfalls for a beginner.

The first pitfalls, in fact, can begin even at the interview - for example, the project is new, the interviewing process has not yet been established, the first question may be “Do you have a printed copy of your CV?” from a foreign representative, in general, this process will be debugged on you as one of the experimental rabbits. They may also suddenly put you on the “conveyor”: skip through three stages of the interview for more than an hour each at once. This can cause problems if you are not prepared for an interview or if you have other interviews scheduled for that day. But this is so, by the way.

General considerations.

"If someone is to blame, then who is clear in advance."

At first, there is some natural tendency in the case of misunderstandings (what was there about managerial and communication skills?), friction and, especially, conflicts involving a newcomer to interpret them not in his favor. Even if the newcomer is right, there are still reasons to dismiss him: “the manager cannot work with him,” people “do not fit into the informal corporate format” or something like that. If this “doesn’t work out” will happen again with the next ones, then either after a couple of candidates they will finally work together or think about it, or maybe “fix something in the conservatory”. In general, if you are someone from the bosses or “old-timers” of those those who are listened to “suddenly” by something “didn’t like” or somehow make him constantly want to pin you up or hurt or demonstrate his wit instead of expressing clearly what is required of you, if the case “comes to pens ”, it’s clear who will be easier to fire - a newcomer on a probationary period who needs to be paid for three days, or a“ more full-fledged ”employee who needs to pay for two or three months upon termination of the employment contract and with whom he already somehow worked gone? And if in a couple of iterations they still find who they want and with whom they work together, they will write off the case with you as “you never know what happens”. Yes, and the question is whether you yourself want to work in such an environment. who will be easier to fire - a newcomer on a probationary period, who needs to be paid for three days, or a “more full-fledged" employee who needs to pay for two or three months upon termination of the employment contract and doesn’t work with him somehow? And if in a couple of iterations they still find who they want and with whom they work together, they will write off the case with you as “you never know what happens”. Yes, and the question is whether you yourself want to work in such an environment. who will be easier to fire - a newcomer on a probationary period, who needs to be paid for three days, or a “more full-fledged" employee who needs to pay for two or three months upon termination of the employment contract and doesn’t work with him somehow? And if in a couple of iterations they still find who they want and with whom they work together, they will write off the case with you as “you never know what happens”. Yes, and the question is whether you yourself want to work in such an environment.

“Vasya is conflict-free. This is an axiom. If you have a conflict with Vasya, then only you can be guilty. This is a consequence of the axiom. "

The situation is almost the same when a boss in a new place immediately speaks of himself (and other bosses speak of him) as a “conflict-free” person: this is just a thick hint that if you get confused and have a conflict, then you are to blame you are pre-assigned, not “conflict free”. Misunderstandings, oddly enough (although, in general, not strange), can occur literally out of the blue. For example, at the very beginning of the project, the lead developer, let's call him “Peter,” describes which plug-ins for the IDE should be installed. You ask him to write off the entire IDE with the plugins already installed (time does not wait, you, and not only you, have already read the “motivational introductory” repeatedly, that you need to start working faster), he, for reasons of greater correctness, instead gives xml file with plugin update sites, successfully worked for him half a year or a year ago. During the day you try to apply this file, and you do not succeed: one of the plugins is no longer at the specified address and can not be installed, but at the same time all the plugins that are on the list can not be installed. When you report this to the “conflict-free” boss, he replies that “Peter” “cannot advise the bad,” and that you probably have crooked hands. ( you have crooked hands. ( you have crooked hands. (PS: self-criticism of “post mortem”: it’s stupid to use it is not clear which file is unclear where - “cool” (although it is partially justified by the fact that “it is necessary very quickly”). Instead, you need to be able to quickly cut into obscure issues using Google and associative thinking. At least it was possible (for the same “barren day”, possibly on another machine) 1) to find how to install the plug-ins one at a time, 2) to isolate the “missing” plug-ins 3) to find where they had “moved” or to establish that they had disappeared from meet.)

But it can be the other way around - you can immediately impress a particularly “promising” employee, who, on the contrary, will be given a head start on “long-established” long-working employees (for example, you will be hired as a leading Java programmer in a web project, even with full your ignorance of the Javascript language (however, if you have experience using GWT, in which knowledge of Javascript is not necessary)).

Well, with a good development of communication skills, in the event of a conflict with the manager, there is even a chance to explain to the higher authorities that the manager is wrong. I wanted to write that it wouldn’t be easier to do this before the conflict, but it became clear that before the conflict there simply was no reason to appeal to the higher authorities.

Secondly, noticed a "bad omen" that if during the trial period you were reminded that you are on a trial period, then most likely it will be "littered". The hypothesis - the reason is that its passage, in general, was not planned, or rather, it was planned for 30-60 percent.

Thirdly , the fact that the probationary period will be “littered” usually becomes clear in two or three weeks: everything somehow strangely goes awry and elementary things remain incomprehensible (as if they were specially kept in a state of “incomprehensibility”). Such an inundated probationary period usually takes one and a half months with a “normal” set of circumstances and two with a fixed general date of dismissal (I will touch on in more detail below).

Encountered species of pitfalls.

• Management poorly understands what it wants technically.

  It is found, in theory, rarely, but the author personally hit this once. It was a “protracted stratap”, the financing of which continued at the good will of its financial director, who was also one of the top managers at one real estate agency. For this agency, this company also served as an IT department. The company wanted to write KIS, they wanted to have a GUI module for it, which could work both as a web client and as a “heavy” Swing application (neither I nor they knew the concept of a “rich client”, the beginning 2005). In the end, the author chose some cropped-modified version of SwiXML as a universal middleware. Employers could not clearly articulate what they needed as a base - a web or swing version. The author was at least second in this area,
  
  As some self-criticism of the “post mortem”, we can say that if the author was more experienced, then maybe he could quickly find and “promote” / “push” / “retract” / “impose” / “introduce” a solution to them, but there is a counter-suspicion that, being so smart, the author would hardly be flattered by that vacancy ;-). In other matters, after the dismissal, the month from which the job search took the last week (the other three weeks is a temporary part-time job), the author found another job, where there were more salaries and understandability of tasks.
  
  

• “It takes a man five minutes to fire him.”

  The wording is somewhat exaggerated, but at least a couple of varieties of such a phenomenon exist: 1) you need to temporarily take a place with someone, then to transfer the right person to it, or 2) take more people in advance than they plan to leave. The first may be, for example, when a mass closure of projects is taking place in an outsourcing company due to market contraction, and suddenly one project has been launched: it turned out to “untwist” —find the customer. In this case, they take one “superfluous" project, and even, at the insistence of the interviewed manager, a person who just barely reaches the vacancy level, and then in every possible way hide from him "terrible professional secrets" such as automatic formatting using IDE, semi-automatic refactoring and other “combing the code” with them - to let a person turn negative into a private matter.
  
  Such an “aggressive personnel selection” can be practiced on an ongoing basis, in particular, in some IT companies serving Internet sweepstakes: people with specific skills are needed there, which, it seems, according to the local authorities, are impossible to develop, and it is only possible to select those who already have them. In such companies, dismissal is also on the assembly line, there are fixed dates for mass layoffs and a tricky policy of making job offers: it is necessary that between the job offer and the date of mass layoffs there should be less (at least a week) the maximum probationary period possible by law - three months . If the employee even after just three weeks decided to “put an end to”,
  
  A “bonus” to such a “personnel conveyor” is a somewhat “unfair” and generally indifferent attitude towards newcomers: if you still fire half, then “if we offended someone in vain” - this is a trifle against the general background. “So you're out of luck. So you are a failure. Go out! Losers do not need “Corporation”! ” If you are suddenly forced to migrate from the brake computer that was first given to you to a new one in the middle of the process of completing the task that the week was spent on, otherwise it will be transferred to the next department, while migrating you need to copy ~ 100 GiB workspace'ov, and in parallel to master work on it in Windows 7 after XP - this is just such a case.
  
  

• "Russian SCRUM, senseless and merciless."

  The author met in the fall of 2009 in one company from the "top 10" software companies in St. Petersburg (though, after a couple of months in that company, massive staff reductions began - correct: "by agreement of the parties" and with salary payments for two months as a day off benefits). They follow not so much the “spirit” of the SCRUM methodology as their “letter”, and not everywhere, but arbitrarily, mainly when it is most situationally contrary to the spirit and negatively affects the result. The team is recruited by 60-70% of the people who, according to the SCRUM methodology, had not worked before and generally were newcomers. The shortcomings of “flexible” and “waterfall” technologies are successfully combined: the former take a frivolous attitude to planning - it takes very little time: an hour for a three-week sprint with the division of tasks into sub-tasks no longer than five, but preferably two or three, hours (totaling about 10 seconds on average for planning one task), from the second - the inability to deviate from the hastily planned and correct planning errors during the sprint. It serves as a source of “stocks” that can be easily translated into “who needs it” (with a record in a personal file), due to which it is well combined with the practice of “taking people with a margin” from the previous paragraph.
  
  

• "Recurrent" trial period.

  At the end of the probationary period (yes, a full three months) you are told that you do not fit them, but you can quit of your own free will and immediately write a job application - they will take you. And so constantly.
  
  

• Underestimated and "muddy" tasks.

  It would be more accurate to call this pitfall “hidden investigation abyss”. When both the volume of work and the time required for their implementation should be the result of a separate study that was not foreseen in advance, which still needs to be done, and the result may have a spread of 10 times, well, or differ 10 times from the value set at initial assessment. Here, in its pure form, there is a “floating jamb” (unknown at first to a beginner). The above-mentioned point about “misunderstandings and conflicts” may work: when an employee with a good reputation has “run into” such a task, he will be more likely to believe that the task was previously incorrectly evaluated than a newcomer.
  
  Yes, and such tasks tend to fall on just beginners. “Old-timer” often has the right, not quite formal, but in fact, not to “choose tasks according to your taste”, but to “set priorities for yourself” (based on your experience) what to do first and what - secondly, and prioritize tasks, which task, based on which one, in his opinion, is more necessary and more important for the project as a whole and, by doing which one, he will be able to quickly bring more benefits to the project. The queue may not reach the third or fourth stage, including due to the fact that the “over-task” that includes it may be re-planned with the choice of another way to solve it, and then the initial task is a surprise! - will disappear. Yes, “old-timers”, trying in every possible way to “push” such “muddy” tasks from themselves, are often right: business has a chance to get by with workaround. The newcomer, however, has an increased risk of “getting” to such “mines” also because the bosses can cherish the backward thought that a fresh person will come with a fresh look and from this new point of view the solution to the problem can be seen easier and faster.
  
  It’s especially “fun” if you have several weekly tasks for each trial plan, and the first one you undertake turns out to be from the series “hidden investigation abyss”: you could do three and a quarter tasks by the deadline out of four, and so make of four - zero and a half tasks. To "get out" and succeed to the maximum, in such a situation you need managerial skills (which was not originally planned): assess tasks in advance for an abundance of pitfalls (for this you need to have the skills to break down tasks, conduct component risk assessments and other planning), "punch" yourself as the first ones in turn, those tasks that are less “muddy”, reasonably “jump off” the task or seek re-planning if, during its solution, its “turbidity” suddenly emerges, “Translate arrows” into subcontractors (such as task managers) and pedal the thesis that they substitute you by (provoking) disruption of the deadlines for which you are assigned to answer. If for this reason, for some reason, you have a personal “point” on “conflict-free” (as mentioned above), then it will bind your hands to a large extent.
  
  On the other hand, “muddy” tasks are a chance ;-). A chance to learn new technologies and techniques (such as launching ELF files from under Tomcat in MSVS on a virtual machine - you must not forget to kill the child process after 5 seconds, which is unclear how to do it except from a specially launched parallel thread), train in (over- ) engineering such as writing frameworks on annotations. Especially if this does not result in dismissal due to the failure to pass the probationary period ;-)
  
  Also, “pushing muddy tasks for beginners” completely fits into the mainstream of the “personnel conveyor” policy - “at the same time”, if half is fired anyway. But on the other hand, this can be considered as a peculiar version of “baptism of fire”.
  
  Not very large, but fatally significant for some, the number of “muddy” tasks also appears in the case of “meaningless and merciless SCRUM” 'and from the previous paragraph. These are not only tasks from the “hidden investigation abyss” series, but also those that are too dependent on other tasks (you cannot start once until others have been solved), which at first is imperceptible or may not be deliberately emphasized. Here it is necessary to show considerable quickness at that brief stage, when the performers sort out tasks for themselves so that you do not have a similar — last — problem area. Here, too, you need to have some experience, which at first is usually not. Although, I suspect this exoticism remained in 2009 and earlier.
  
  The item “Management poorly understands what it wants in technical terms” can also be considered a hypertrophied version of this item - to the extent of “we are looking for a middle developer to carry out the tasks of a leading architect”. But in general, the main thing here - not to flatter on such vacancies and be able to reasonably and intelligibly explain to people what they “want a penny for a penny” - they can understand.
  
  

• General “rottenness” of a particular narrow area of ​​work.

  It should be highlighted in a paragraph separate from the previous one ... Works are different. If the organization is large and makes one large product with variations, then there is a good chance that it will have work areas with significantly different “interest” in tasks and prospects for professional growth. It’s not that it was a pitfall “just for a beginner”, but ... Someone writes the kernel, and someone with the same beautiful Java developer tag is urgently figuring out “why the crap stopped working with the customer in trial operation, yes, damn it, it’s spelled incorrectly and never worked normally - it saved the default mechanism, but then the last changes were made six months ago, why was this error written only yesterday ?? ” and is actually engaged in programming for a total of three months in two years, of which two months - during the trial period, and, so, in fact, and without really studying beyond the general level the system that the company makes. And -surprise! it’s not at all a surprise - that it’s precisely in such areas that the staff turnover is high, people leave after six months of their own free will (yes, by 146% of their own), and a newcomer to probability theory is most likely to be hit by such a site. It’s generally useless to tell the authorities about it, the presence of such sites is an objective consequence of the ways of organizing work, in any case, someone should do this work, “organizing social justice” is not the goal of the company, it is stupidly easier for the company to put up with ext. costs due to staff turnover in such areas. There may be few plots, but it is they who make the main contribution to the general staff turnover at the company, and they are also an unchanged substantial supplier of vacancies.
  
  

• General “exotic” novice.

  Rarely, but ... If you are "unformatted" by some criterion, for example, age - you are over 35, then there is one more reason for bias: the stereotype "at age 30 it’s time to be a manager, not a coder," and even more so "not to look for work other than through personal connections ”has not yet disappeared, for some you are turning into an exotic“ loser, ”whom“ do not mind ”. Here you have to be ready more than usual to “explain yourself”, “tear the template”, “create your image” and show other facets of communicative balancing act. On the other hand - but is it worth it, since from the very beginning such misunderstandings have gone?
  
  

• Smaller misunderstandings.

  Of the lesser less dangerous misunderstandings, I would like to mention a situation where the boss, in his opinion, knows exactly how to carry out the task given to them, and you have more experience in performing similar tasks like this and know how to do it faster, but the bosses cannot evaluate your method. For example, it is necessary to internationalize the Russian web interface on JSP (~ 150 files) - to put pieces of text into resource files and replace them with links to it, the authorities are not aware of the existence of Word macros and insists that everything needs to be done with your hands in a notepad. Here the options may be different - for example, to do as the authorities say, or to do what you think is necessary, or to do as you think is necessary, but so far the authorities do not see, or “protect” your approach to the authorities.
  
  

If it still didn’t work out.

When a firm hires five people in a row and not one in the end is not retained, it doesn’t look so bad (at least not so noticeable), as if a person changes five jobs and not one of them ends up not held. If you (or “you”, but you were “extreme”, of course, anyway) “failed” the probation period, then you need to think about how to reflect this in future interviews. You can reflect this episode of work in the resume, you can not mention it (especially if there is no entry in the work book), you can mention it verbally, at the second or third stage of the interview, you can start mentioning in the resume, but not immediately, but after a couple of jobs ( they still need to get!). If you don’t mention, then you need to somehow explain why you allegedly did not work at that time (yeah, people quit on May 22 on Tuesday - neither Monday nor the end of the month - of their own free will, having worked a year with a tail, and something has been suddenly looking for work since September 8). If at the same time, “by the law of meanness,” the reason for leaving your previous job was a low salary, in your opinion (yeah, oil painting: “went from a low salary to nowhere”), then you have to look for another explanation, in general, decide what you better: the reputation of the employee who “failed” the probationary period or the reputation of the employee who is suddenly inclined to quit his job. If the work is reflected in the work book or for another reason you decide to mention it, then you need to think about how to explain the reasons for leaving. If, for example, you were asked to write “on your own” because of the poor quality of your code and because you were redundant in the team (more precisely, someone superfluous was planned in advance in the team, and you turned out to be this “extreme", perhaps due to the fact that the quality of the work process, including and the quality of the code, deliberately “launched” wherever you can), and when interviewing the next place of work you will say that you left because of a conflict in the team, then you yourself will be labeled “conflict” directly from the interview stage ”, Which may burden the passage of the probationary period already there ;-). Well, no one promised that the little tricks would be completely free and would never go sideways ;-). Then, after a couple of years / places of work, “tightening up” the quality of the code, it will be possible to name (verbally) the “real” reason. and when you are interviewing the next place of work you will say that you left because of a conflict in the team, then you yourself will be labeled “conflict” directly from the interview stage, which may burden the passage of the probationary period there ;-) . Well, no one promised that the little tricks would be completely free and would never go sideways ;-). Then, after a couple of years / places of work, “tightening up” the quality of the code, it will be possible to name (verbally) the “real” reason. and when you are interviewing the next place of work you will say that you left because of a conflict in the team, then you yourself will be labeled “conflict” directly from the interview stage, which may burden the passage of the probationary period there ;-) . Well, no one promised that the little tricks would be completely free and would never go sideways ;-). Then, after a couple of years / places of work, “tightening up” the quality of the code, it will be possible to name (verbally) the “real” reason.

And one more positive, and especially important for IT and Java, moment of an unfulfilled trial period - there remains knowledge about technologies, techniques, platforms and libraries, which are otherwise difficult to obtain.

Something like a conclusion.

The phrase about “baptism of fire” already flashed above. This is so - in case of successful completion of the probationary period, then it will be easier (at least there will be some kind of positive reputation). In general, for successful “baptism of fire” and overcoming the stress associated with incorporation into the new structure, it is desirable to satisfy the vacancy requirements “by 146%”, to be “a cut above” the required job . After all, the required performance will need to be issued taking into account unexpected risks, misunderstandings, biases and other possible interfering and demotivating factors. To do this, you must at least be a little manager: planning and risks are managerial competencies.

A couple more tips. It is good to,so that all “fraudulent” instructions, directions, explanations and your answers to them would be recorded , otherwise the team leader will verbally ask you to commit the unverified code, and then the project manager will say that the team leader could not say that. And remember that a personal matter is being conducted on you, where all your mistakes are recorded - although it is somewhat biased, you will not write frankly verified lies or overly evaluative judgments that break out of the business style with the degree of your appraisal. True, you will not be allowed to read it either, although it would be useful to know which direction of work on yourself would be most optimal.

One must also be internally prepared for the fact that the probationary period can be “failed”, including not through your fault. In consolation, we can say what is usually, i.e. in more than 50% of cases, this trouble still does not happen ;-)

Part 1/3. What are the 'buns'.
Part 3/3. What are the employers. Characteristics..