February 1, 2015 at 22:46How to IT specialist leave for Germany. Part 1
In the last couple of days I often have to answer questions about how I found work in Germany, so I decided to combine my entire path (still unfinished) into a single text and publish it here, because the topic seems interesting and relevant to me.
The idea of leaving somewhere outside this country was a long time ago, but somehow not to say that everything here was very bad and unbearable. However, returning in October from a two-week trip to Europe (Barcelona, Brussels, Amsterdam and Prague), the desire was noticeably strengthened. Plus, all these #krymyash, oil, the ruble and the great Pu have already pretty much gotten.
A variant with Germany was suggested to me by a friend who was going to go there to study. Googled, and indeed - for IT specialists (I am a Java developer) everything is very good. There is a lot of information on this topic on the Internet, I will not duplicate it again (google with the bluecard keyword). In short, the employer's desire to pay you more than 37,000 euros per year is enough.
So, I had a desire to go to Germany to work and live. If you have such thoughts, then this will require knowledge of at least the English language at a level sufficient to conduct a simple dialogue. If you have knowledge of German at least at some level, this will greatly simplify the task of finding a job.
I wrote a summary in English in the form of EuroPass .
Next, we get all possible diplomas, certificates and translate them either immediately into German or into English, if you look only for English-language work.
I began the search directly at the end of November, the number of the 25th. Most job vacancies are posted on monster.de and xing.com . We register on both sites, on xing we fill out the profile from our resume. I wrote a small utility for sending mail of the same type by email and started collecting a database of addresses for the response. The keyword "java" began a search. Immediately he screened out vacancies in which it was directly written that knowledge of the German language was required. He left those written in English or German, but nothing was said about the language. I sent a letter to the screened emails with a resume, diplomas and certificates of approximately the following contents:
For the entire time I searched, I sent out about 150 letters. In most cases, they refused immediately because of lack of knowledge of German (approximately 80% of the answers). About 15% said they would consider my candidacy, and after a couple of weeks they wrote that I did not fit them. I was not very upset, because I realized that it doesn’t matter how many failures there are, I need to go through just one job.
So, about a week after the start of sending out your resume, the first positive reviews and invitations to talk on the phone began to appear. German recruiters can easily call you in the middle of the day, so plan ahead where you can quickly retire. However, not all of these, many still set a specific time. As a result, I talked with 5 recruiters. I wrote to the company with which everything had grown together on December 7 and already on the 12th they sent me an answer that they were ready to consider my candidacy. I was immediately sent a link to the test task at codility.com. There were 4 small puzzles from the category of “write binary search in an array”. All tasks take 2 hours, but this is much in excess. The next day, HR reported to me that I scored 365 points out of 400 and they are happy to invite me to a Skype interview with the developer.
December 15, we phoned on Skype with a developer from the company (he turned out to be Russian, but spoke English with him :)). At first, there was also a bit of programming in the shared screen mode - one task of the same level as in the online test. This was followed by a series of questions on Java - multithreading, collections, spring, hibernate, databases, application servers and everything that you have written there and not written in the resume.
A couple of hours after the interview, HR wrote me again and said that they were ready to conduct the next stage of the interview with me in 2 days. I already spoke with the lead developer, but the format of the conversation was exactly the same - coding, then questions.
The next day, December 18, HRC gladly informed me that they were inviting me to an interview in their office. Due to the upcoming holidays, the closest possible date was January 16th. I had a Schengen visa open, I could fly at least the next day. I got paid round-trip tickets, a month passed and now I flew to Munich.
On the appointed day, I flew to Munich. For the couple of hours that I had free, I did not say that I fell in love with him, but I really liked the city. So, I arrived at the office. Even in the letter they told me that there will be 3 rounds of the hour, 2 people per hour. At first 2 developers came and had a generally similar conversation, as they had before on Skype (and again programming, yes).
The next stage was with a client manager and another developer, but he was already talking about all kinds of situations during the development process: what to do if suddenly there was a jamb of your code in the production, how you will look for it, how to fix and deploy the patch; what to do if the day before the big release they come to you and ask you to remake some things very urgently - and stuff like that.
The third stage was held with the vice president of development, another leading developer and HR manager. There have already been questions that annoy me very much and have not been asked at interviews in Russia for a long time: what are your strengths / weaknesses? who do you see yourself in our company after 5 years; sell yourself to us in 2 minutes - in my opinion, these questions do not say much about a person. Although judging by the fact that after each of my answers (I, of course, prepared in advance) they required me to say something else and had to improvise, the interviewers wanted to see what my reaction would be. At this stage, I messed up a lot, as it seemed to me.
As a result, they promised me an answer next week.
The next week passed, but no one wrote to me. Already on Monday, January 26, I wrote it myself, and apparently this was the last test, since a rather large letter with the offer came to me in a minute (that is, the answer was ready, but it was simply not sent). Everything suited me, I asked to send a contract for an email and an original courier service. A contract was brought on Friday, I gave all the necessary documents for the embassy to be translated and made an appointment to submit documents for a national visa.
So far, that's all I can tell. Based on the results of obtaining a visa and the process of moving I will write the second part :)
The idea of leaving somewhere outside this country was a long time ago, but somehow not to say that everything here was very bad and unbearable. However, returning in October from a two-week trip to Europe (Barcelona, Brussels, Amsterdam and Prague), the desire was noticeably strengthened. Plus, all these #krymyash, oil, the ruble and the great Pu have already pretty much gotten.
A variant with Germany was suggested to me by a friend who was going to go there to study. Googled, and indeed - for IT specialists (I am a Java developer) everything is very good. There is a lot of information on this topic on the Internet, I will not duplicate it again (google with the bluecard keyword). In short, the employer's desire to pay you more than 37,000 euros per year is enough.
Training
So, I had a desire to go to Germany to work and live. If you have such thoughts, then this will require knowledge of at least the English language at a level sufficient to conduct a simple dialogue. If you have knowledge of German at least at some level, this will greatly simplify the task of finding a job.
I wrote a summary in English in the form of EuroPass .
Next, we get all possible diplomas, certificates and translate them either immediately into German or into English, if you look only for English-language work.
Work searches
I began the search directly at the end of November, the number of the 25th. Most job vacancies are posted on monster.de and xing.com . We register on both sites, on xing we fill out the profile from our resume. I wrote a small utility for sending mail of the same type by email and started collecting a database of addresses for the response. The keyword "java" began a search. Immediately he screened out vacancies in which it was directly written that knowledge of the German language was required. He left those written in English or German, but nothing was said about the language. I sent a letter to the screened emails with a resume, diplomas and certificates of approximately the following contents:
Hello!
I was interested in your job advertisement Java Programmer published on monster.de. I choose this way of communication to apply to your Java programmer.
I have 6 years experience in information systems development on Java platform using Spring, J2EE-components, databases and UI frameworks. I have work experience with application servers and Java-related tools. More information about my programming experiences and abilities you can see in my curriculum vitae in attachment.
I hope that through my work experience I will be a new member of your Java programming team.
Salary Expectations - € XXXXX.
Earliest possible start date - mid February 2015.
Sincerely yours,
Ilya Ermolov
Java Developer
Moscow, Russia
For the entire time I searched, I sent out about 150 letters. In most cases, they refused immediately because of lack of knowledge of German (approximately 80% of the answers). About 15% said they would consider my candidacy, and after a couple of weeks they wrote that I did not fit them. I was not very upset, because I realized that it doesn’t matter how many failures there are, I need to go through just one job.
Interview
So, about a week after the start of sending out your resume, the first positive reviews and invitations to talk on the phone began to appear. German recruiters can easily call you in the middle of the day, so plan ahead where you can quickly retire. However, not all of these, many still set a specific time. As a result, I talked with 5 recruiters. I wrote to the company with which everything had grown together on December 7 and already on the 12th they sent me an answer that they were ready to consider my candidacy. I was immediately sent a link to the test task at codility.com. There were 4 small puzzles from the category of “write binary search in an array”. All tasks take 2 hours, but this is much in excess. The next day, HR reported to me that I scored 365 points out of 400 and they are happy to invite me to a Skype interview with the developer.
December 15, we phoned on Skype with a developer from the company (he turned out to be Russian, but spoke English with him :)). At first, there was also a bit of programming in the shared screen mode - one task of the same level as in the online test. This was followed by a series of questions on Java - multithreading, collections, spring, hibernate, databases, application servers and everything that you have written there and not written in the resume.
A couple of hours after the interview, HR wrote me again and said that they were ready to conduct the next stage of the interview with me in 2 days. I already spoke with the lead developer, but the format of the conversation was exactly the same - coding, then questions.
The next day, December 18, HRC gladly informed me that they were inviting me to an interview in their office. Due to the upcoming holidays, the closest possible date was January 16th. I had a Schengen visa open, I could fly at least the next day. I got paid round-trip tickets, a month passed and now I flew to Munich.
Full time interview
On the appointed day, I flew to Munich. For the couple of hours that I had free, I did not say that I fell in love with him, but I really liked the city. So, I arrived at the office. Even in the letter they told me that there will be 3 rounds of the hour, 2 people per hour. At first 2 developers came and had a generally similar conversation, as they had before on Skype (and again programming, yes).
The next stage was with a client manager and another developer, but he was already talking about all kinds of situations during the development process: what to do if suddenly there was a jamb of your code in the production, how you will look for it, how to fix and deploy the patch; what to do if the day before the big release they come to you and ask you to remake some things very urgently - and stuff like that.
The third stage was held with the vice president of development, another leading developer and HR manager. There have already been questions that annoy me very much and have not been asked at interviews in Russia for a long time: what are your strengths / weaknesses? who do you see yourself in our company after 5 years; sell yourself to us in 2 minutes - in my opinion, these questions do not say much about a person. Although judging by the fact that after each of my answers (I, of course, prepared in advance) they required me to say something else and had to improvise, the interviewers wanted to see what my reaction would be. At this stage, I messed up a lot, as it seemed to me.
As a result, they promised me an answer next week.
Answer and documents
The next week passed, but no one wrote to me. Already on Monday, January 26, I wrote it myself, and apparently this was the last test, since a rather large letter with the offer came to me in a minute (that is, the answer was ready, but it was simply not sent). Everything suited me, I asked to send a contract for an email and an original courier service. A contract was brought on Friday, I gave all the necessary documents for the embassy to be translated and made an appointment to submit documents for a national visa.
So far, that's all I can tell. Based on the results of obtaining a visa and the process of moving I will write the second part :)