About login to IT. And learning efficiency

Classic way – university. For a long time. Not easy. But it gives a system of knowledge. And Wednesday. And a certain kick – industrial practice. And a certain boost in terms of overall development. If there is no VO, I think this is still a relevant option – general development, systematic thinking, strict frameworks and the help of the environment are still useful. But if we are talking about a second VO (which costs money), there are already options. Some people think that there is a lot of useless stuff, but there is a plus here – you will learn something that you yourself would never learn. For example, I personally would not study linear algebra myself, but it is needed to understand computer graphics.

Let the self-taught. Why not. Before the hype of the courses, a lot of people came to IT from engineers, physicists, and mathematicians. There are a lot of books. Articles on Habré too. There is a training video on YouTube. “Pirate” versions of video courses are also available. Coursera, steptik, epenedu and further on the list. It is not expensive. But it's time-consuming. And it requires more motivation. Hard ass to sit and teach every day. And systematic. The difficulty here is not even that there is no one to answer questions and give hints. And the fact is that, without an overall picture, it’s easy to drown in the flow of information. There is no expert who will write the curriculum. And who will show the options for the path. You can pick up fragments without incorporating them into a single picture, and delve into one area without realizing that you need to take adjacent ones as well. It's best to have a friendly guru or take a few classes with a tutor/mentor from the industry. You can go to a tutor all the time – it will be more expensive, but progress is faster (conditionally by 30%), but you can also combine it by contacting only where it will give the maximum boost. Career guidance (there are hundreds of areas in IT), curriculum, periodic assessment of the quality of material mastery with recommendations.

The same ones coursesthat have been promoted for the last few years. Most, in fact, are short-term retraining courses. The increase in efficiency with savings in labor costs is much less than with individual lessons, but it’s a little easier than doing it on your own, and the price is lower. The problem is marketing activity and creating inflated expectations. Like, look at the salary of seniors, and after the courses you will be a junior, and after a year you will be a middle, and after 2 years you will already be a senior and you will start earning 300 thousand per second. You won't start. Not everyone has enough abilities, motivation, energy, or talents. And the course is often unidirectional. Conditionally – Python developer. Well done for learning the syntax of the language. We talked a little about algorithms and data structures. But in fact, it would be nice to learn a lot from neighboring areas: sql, networks, architectures and much more – to understand how symmetric encryption differs from asymmetric encryption. A graduate of short-term courses can work on typical tasks within a large enterprise, where there is a flow of such tasks and the ranking and classification is clearly defined. But it will be difficult to move forward. Because you need to look more broadly. 1C developer writes a request. But whether it will work and whether it will do it quickly depends on both the 1C cluster and the sql server, and this depends on virtualization. and further to the level of raids on storage systems. He is not required to have deep knowledge and be able to configure storage systems, but if a problem arises, in order to understand together as a team what the problem is and how to solve it, some common understanding of what colleagues are doing is necessary. Otherwise, it turns out that the person has completed RTA courses and knows his field. It works in the test. But I don’t know that in production it is necessary to open ports on the ITU from its server where the code is executed. This is an example from life. And it can be even more complicated, for example, I talked to a colleague – they are oil scientists. Oil deposits are predicted based on, for example, seismic data. You need to know data analysis methods, libraries and geophysics. Or classic – 1C. In addition to the platform language, you need to know the subject area – accounting, management, warehouse accounting, budgeting, etc. Moreover, he knows better than an ordinary accountant. He presses buttons “without delving into it.” And here are short-term courses. Which, in theory, before the hype were considered advanced training courses. Retraining starts at 250 hours. More often 500-750. Typical retraining programs (based on HE) -2 years (in the evenings after work). Haces are important. In 72 hours, even if they want to tell you about the same thing, they will do it extremely superficially. There is no silver bullet in teaching yet.
Further, often there is no entrance selection, and it is symbolic. This means that the course will be designed inclusively for those who have no basic training and no advanced topics at all. Groups strive to charge more (more people pay, higher profits), but as the group grows, efficiency strives to reach the level of point 2 – self-training using video lessons. Working with 1-2 textbooks, a teacher can very flexibly adapt to both the level and needs and respond to any misunderstandings promptly. Or answer questions. And if you have a hundred students in a stream, this is impossible even in theory. Well, there’s an interesting point – the salary of teachers of these same online schools is often much lower than the salary that their marketers talk about. It is not specific enough for an experienced specialist. And the requirements, if you read Head Hunter, are not the greatest. That is, the quality of the material in a free course by a top lecturer (Massachusetts or Moscow State University) with a free lecture on YouTube may be higher than that of a paid one. Where it may turn out that the same lecture is being retold to you. As I was told in an informal conversation at one training center even before the hype of the courses, we read books out loud for those who cannot read themselves.

Job. This is also an option for professional development. Starting from a certain moment, when at least someone is ready to take it. The downside is that it will take a lot of time to solve some typical problems. But it’s also a plus that you can engage in professional development, you get paid for it. But here you need to choose carefully. There are large companies with a lot of dead-end positions where you can deal with tasks of the same type and one direction for 10 years in a row. There are large ones who are ready to invest money in your training (including hundreds of thousands – for an individual this is significant, but for a corporation it is not). There are small companies where there is no division of strict functionality and there are experienced lazy senior colleagues who themselves will not mind teaching you something or delegating this new area (for example, to push you off your shoulders). Some advanced training options are only available here. Just sitting down with a textbook and writing a program is one thing. And at work there are users, load, cyber attacks. And experience already shows. What exactly needs to be mastered and practice shows whether you did it successfully or not. There are business needs that you wouldn’t guess about while taking courses at home, for example, geo-reservation of critical systems. And then there are the information security requirements for IT, which forces you to learn to solve problems, not in the way that is convenient, you know how, and habitually, but in a more cunning, but correct way from the point of view of security specialists