December 20, 2013 at 18:48Java programmer in St. Petersburg. Overview of the labor market from the perspective of the applicant. Part 1/3
The idea of describing something from my work experience has long been ripe. Gradually, it developed to the idea of writing a review of the labor market, as it is seen by the employee and the applicant (more precisely, the author as the employee and the applicant ;-)). The presentation turned out to be somewhat subjective and not pretending to be complete. It is made on the basis of experience, mainly own experience and the experience of acquaintances. The bias somehow turned out by itself in the direction of describing possible unpleasant surprises. The article consists of three parts - “What are the 'buns'”, “Pitfalls for a beginner” and “What are the employers” . The central part is the most voluminous and detailed - it contains moments that are most, according to the author, worthy of attention. The first and third parts are also largely written in terms of “pitfalls”.
In the end, it was decided to break the resulting article of 35,000+ characters into three posts. This post contains the first part.
In addition to the banal “the more the better”, there are a couple of minor remarks. Not everyone likes white salary, no matter how hard they try to convince us otherwise. Also, in the case of a salary on a card, banks can be different: one is Alpha, the partners of banks, which have many ATMs in the metro, another is City, whose ATMs are mainly located at Shell and Neste gas stations and in Lenta hypermarkets, the third is Sberbank, which by default offers a Visa Electron / Maestro card, where you can withdraw money without commission in a few places, and the fourth is some “trifle” that has no Internet banking, half a dozen ATMs and withdrawals at foreign ATMs for 10% of the commission or not possible at all, and blocking to mouths in case of theft strictly in a personal appearance at the head office (not a subsidiary or branch) to a specialist to block, office hours Tuesday,
The larger the age, the more stable it becomes.
Some companies have seniority and official “veterans” who have worked for 10 or 15 years, and some employees, working for 10 or more years, manage to go on maternity leave twice.
It happens differently - from “08: 00-17: 00 strictly, before they do not let me in, later they expel me” to an almost free schedule. The worst options are strictly 10-19 or strictly 11-20 - so there is no chance to catch some computer firms with a “strict” mode (Mon-Fri 10-18) and in most stores on a business day.
Part 2/3. Pitfalls for the "beginner".
Part 3/3. What are the employers. Characteristics.
In the end, it was decided to break the resulting article of 35,000+ characters into three posts. This post contains the first part.
What are the 'buns'
Salary
In addition to the banal “the more the better”, there are a couple of minor remarks. Not everyone likes white salary, no matter how hard they try to convince us otherwise. Also, in the case of a salary on a card, banks can be different: one is Alpha, the partners of banks, which have many ATMs in the metro, another is City, whose ATMs are mainly located at Shell and Neste gas stations and in Lenta hypermarkets, the third is Sberbank, which by default offers a Visa Electron / Maestro card, where you can withdraw money without commission in a few places, and the fourth is some “trifle” that has no Internet banking, half a dozen ATMs and withdrawals at foreign ATMs for 10% of the commission or not possible at all, and blocking to mouths in case of theft strictly in a personal appearance at the head office (not a subsidiary or branch) to a specialist to block, office hours Tuesday,
Stability
The larger the age, the more stable it becomes.
Some companies have seniority and official “veterans” who have worked for 10 or 15 years, and some employees, working for 10 or more years, manage to go on maternity leave twice.
Mode
It happens differently - from “08: 00-17: 00 strictly, before they do not let me in, later they expel me” to an almost free schedule. The worst options are strictly 10-19 or strictly 11-20 - so there is no chance to catch some computer firms with a “strict” mode (Mon-Fri 10-18) and in most stores on a business day.
Professional growth and other self-improvement
Knowledge of platforms and technologies
It seems that it is believed that you need to be able to choose technologies and a platform, but usually you either don’t have to choose (everything was chosen long ago by those who founded the company ;-) (or launched a long-term project)) or the most advanced is selected if possible - to code less with your hands. If the platform has been developing for 10+ years, skills for integrating new technologies into the platform may be required.General code skills
Well, in addition to writing, compiling and running it directly ;-), for which, in general, the notorious “Notepad + command line” (this skill must be in the first place) or FAR is enough, you also need to have automatic substitution, automated refactoring, and automated code alignment and other goodies already have a good IDE, and knowing why we need uniform rules for formatting the code (so that inside the team that will work on the same code (yes, and VCS here too), when comparing different versions of the same file, the difference was inimum and not "replace every line indented with tabs to spaces").
What is most annoying, usually they don’t say such things, and this despite the fact that it’s easy to get to the mastery of the minimum set of “Notepad + command line”. I understood about refactoring and formatting more than four years after I learned what Ant and Tomcat were, and not at the workplace, and generally during the period when I was not working. I suspect that if I had worked all the time, I might not have understood until now.
Yes, there is still a buzzword such as “best practice”. In practice, the maximum that I saw on this part was consultations from the “living bearers” of these practices in the style of “here we did so on project N, we used this and that”. Maybe the practice of systematizing and summarizing the "best practices" somewhere is, I just did not come across.General architecture skills
The topic “what systems are built of” is the same as for technology platforms: I saw it for the first time (= I saw a completely working production example like Hibernate + MySQL / Spring / Resin (the version of the latter must be remembered to the third digit, otherwise it may not work) or Eclipselink + MSSQL / CDI / Liferay 6.1) - consider that you have received a third of the knowledge that you will receive in this area over the next 10 years. It rarely changes, it is updated a little, I saw something new (like Jetty instead of Tomcat) - consider it was lucky for this. Well, or you need to gain experience in addition to work (yes, yes, and in this regard).
At the “intra-project” level - half a year of development and refactoring of your favorite project (how many, how much? One and a half to three person-months? 3000-6000 dollars in St. Petersburg? Or -12000 unearned during this time?), And it will be clear from our own experience , where the modules and layers come from ;-) (here is another reason to seriously engage in development beyond the work). It is better to comprehend inter-project dependencies, more precisely, the construction of new projects (and modules) using the previous ones, the concepts of “core”, “typical implementation”, and “custom parts” on a complex long-term developing platform on which many similar projects are implemented.Knowledge of techniques and tools for organizing the work process
What is a bug tracker, a system of accounting for working hours and SCRUM, and why SCRUM is not a dogma, but only “best practice” and an approximate guide to action, are already known, probably, everywhere, and you can find out, probably, everywhere. A tracker, in general, can theoretically help in addition to programming - for organizing things in general, I have been dreaming of this since 2005, I just can’t find or write anything suitable (so that with built-in MindMaps and change history).Communication and management skills
At one of the works, the SCRUM master liked to repeat: “think about the customer” (probably, as a philologist by his first education, he liked to say something like smart, and you sit there, understand what he meant - spend your time on it, which, after all kinds of rallies, and so not much remains), but only after reading an article on Habr (http://habrahabr.ru/company/maxifier/blog/196554/) about the Russian programmer Vasya, who heroically but unsuccessfully tried all Friday and the whole weekend raise the server with the latest version of the program, and the American boss John, who because the presentation of precisely the latest developed features (everything except which Vasya finally began to display) to the customer on Monday, I realized that this buzzword means - not abstractly in the style of “the client is always right” (“and if the client is wrong, then this is not your client
I think that writing about a possible experience with foreigners, especially for a Java programmer, is not required - and it’s so clear what happens, and it is necessary, and desirable.
Other
Partial compensation for fitness clubs
Many non-small companies offset half.Learning foreign languages (mainly English) at work
Never used, but where it was a lot.Certification Exam Compensation at Microsoft and Sun / Oracle
It happens, though for this they may demand to leave a certificate with them upon dismissal, in order to hang it on the wall for the purpose of self-promotion (more precisely, they hang it on the wall immediately after receipt, but they are not allowed to take it with them upon dismissal)Voluntary health insurance.
The set of “included” services, for which you do not have to pay from your own pocket, is usually worse than mandatory: the company pays only for the initial appointment with the doctor, and the repeated appointment and procedures at its own expense are personally verified. While living without registration, I was lucky to dislocate my knee (2 months of sick leave) even before the compulsory medical insurance was canceled at my place of work, for my money I “paid” only such an option as a polyurethane “gypsum”, and then in local traumatology, and not there where fluid was pumped out of the knee and “gypsum gypsum” was applied.Haulage
At least Alcatel was in 2007-2009, so it can be found in large firms.Access to the Internet, YouTube and social networks.
I mention only because it may not be. Yes - programmers may not have access to the Internet. True, they can be allowed to bring a personal laptop to the workplace and access the personal mobile Internet for their own money. This is somewhat more convenient than the Internet on the same computer you are working on (especially if the processor on the working computer is not quad-core, 2GiB memory (2010) and the swap is not on SSD) - one does not slow down the other, does not share with it the same screen.
Part 2/3. Pitfalls for the "beginner".
Part 3/3. What are the employers. Characteristics.