Enter IT: The risk of becoming a trainee has paid off

    Under the heading “Enter IT”: our former interns, current Senior Developers, answer questions, share experiences and personal stories. It happens that not only students come to internship programs, but also established developers who want to grow and develop professionally. Today Nikolay Peganov will tell about his experience.



    Background

    For a long time I was a developer at one of the Voronezh companies, at some point I began to feel a lack of professional development, because I had to solve the same tasks all the time and apply the good old technologies. It’s quite a common, but at the same time very difficult situation for a developer in my city: for the vast majority of companies in Voronezh, a developer is a kind of “service staff” for management, marketing, etc. specialists who play leading roles almost in all business processes in our region. The very few companies for which software is the main product of their activity set very high requirements for candidates, my modest experience and skills were absolutely uninteresting and insufficient for them.

    To be or not to be a trainee

    I found out about the DataArt internship programs quite by accident, and this seemed to me almost the only way out of my situation. However, the decision to enter the company as a trainee was very difficult: the status of a trainee and the status of a 30-year-old father of the family fit very poorly in the heads of my wife and parents. Another difficulty was that, despite the “internship”, a candidate for such a position would have to go through the same three stages of the interview (including solving a practical problem) as a candidate for a higher position, with the only difference that the trainee would not be evaluated so tough.

    One way or another, I ventured to come to DataArt for an open day and brought a resume. Then everything was swift: after an interview in English, I was invited to an interview with a leading developer, where they asked a lot of easy and not very questions, I answered the majority correctly. The next day I came to write a small test program, which took me about four hours. Based on the results of the audit, I was finally offered a job as a trainee, which I gladly agreed to.

    New life

    I was lucky, and I immediately got a developer position in a large project. At first, I was struck by the variety of technologies and tools unknown to me that were used in the project. But, besides me, a lot of guys already worked on the project, who gladly shared knowledge and experience with me. Soon, I was able to independently solve the tasks set for me, and two months later they congratulated me on the early termination of the practice.

    I worked in this project for another two years. During this time, he mastered all the technologies involved in it, learned and applied many new ones. At the same time, he helped in other projects, studied at internal English courses, met new people, conducted interviews with trainees. In this relatively short time, I gained as much experience and knowledge as it would be impossible to gain, if I had stayed at the same place of work. Not so long ago I have grown to the position of a leading developer, but I continue to study English (already on my own), master unfamiliar technologies and languages, studying at the company's internal courses, listen to interesting and useful lectures of colleagues in recordings and live.

    What came of it all?

    Without exaggeration, I can say that the risk of becoming a trainee for me was more than justified. I increased my professional knowledge, met many interesting people, learned how to quickly and technologically solve the tasks. Moreover, now I finally felt competitive in the market of IT developers, although this has ceased to be important to me since I got into DataArt.

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