How to become the programmer they want to hire – experts answer

Note ed. This is a comment from our VKontakte reader. He decided to argue with the conclusions to this article, it turned out reasonably, we suggest reading.

In fact:

“Love what you do. Enthusiasm will allow you to develop outside of work and gain more skills. ”

Bullshit. The company does not need your enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is an occasion to entrust you with even more work for the same salary, as well as a way to do things that you are not asked about (and then be very surprised why you are not understood). Loving and enthusiastic about IT in general is good and right, but this should not apply to the employer. If your employer so wants to see initiative and active in the ranks of employees, it is better to portray this than to become such in fact (in the end I will explain why).

“Follow the latest technology in your area.”

But sift out the bullshit, and after 10 years it turns out that you know about a dozen technologies that were once a couple of months in the ear and they use 3.5 anonymus in 2.5 projects. More often ask yourself why this or that technology is damp, ask yourself which problems it solves and which it creates, and if the technology creates more problems than it solves, do not waste your time on it, no matter how much money there is in the moment for knowing it offered. Yes, I don’t deny that it’s cool to study blockchain and bitcoins and crawl into a crypto start-up, but keep in mind that after you get your cache and the startup closes due to a depreciation, you will again have to look for work and retrain.

“Do not stop in one direction / language / technology / etc. Expand your knowledge both in depth and in breadth. "

Bullshit. A solid knowledge of the basics is first and foremost. Until the world completely moved to biological storage media and quantum computing (which, with all due respect, is unlikely to happen in the next 40 years), understanding how indexes and sortings work will be in demand. For the rest, it is better to know and be able to use one technology at the “world-class expert” level than to superficially know 50 languages ​​and frameworks, to be Mr. “fingers-in-all-pies”. In addition, by the age of 30 you will be tired of ordering to expand the circle of knowledge.

“Participate in programming competitions. Prizes will help attract recruiters. ”

Bullshit. Employers, in truth, have little interest in where and what letters you received, and the recent analysis of the Telegram protocol on Habra clearly shows what products are obtained from olympiads and contest winners. Spend time on competitions and hackathons just for networking (meeting useful people).

“Develop soft skills: learn to work in a team, share information, just communicate.”

Wow … soft skills. In my memory, most often under soft skills is meant the ability to say exactly what people want to hear, which takes place in dangerously close to "the ability to enter trust in the right people." If you want to practice such games – your will. But personally, I would recommend to study practical psychology instead. And for starters – go to a good psychotherapist and cure your psychological sores (believe me, most likely you have them). Having plunged into this, you will understand what to do next.

“Do not be afraid of responsibility and difficult tasks.”

… but only if you are sure that this holiday of life will be noticed, appreciated and paid. Otherwise, avoid responsibility and heavy tasks.

“Learn to communicate your thoughts effectively to others. For practice, you can, for example, start a blog. ”

To throw it in the dustbin of history in a couple of months. A blog is a feed, promotion, marketing. And you are not a marketer, nope. People read entertainment articles best of all, and few people are interested in technical details – there is StackOverflow for this. By the way, register there and try to answer questions. This is a really good experience.

“Participate in various meetings and conferences. But not only as a listener, but also as a speaker. The good reports received by the audience also attracted the attention of recruiters. ”

Bullshit. The attention of recruiters is attracted by a filtered list of people on LinkedIn, last-minute job closing dates and internal CRMs of recruitment agencies. The skill of public speaking is cool if you aim for management. The rest of the conference come for networking. And the more phones / emails of useful and interesting people you take away from the conference, the better. And in what role do you participate in the event – the speaker or the listener – is immaterial. Remember that the most interesting thing happens on the sidelines.

“Set aside time for training regularly.”

Better, use the employer's resource to learn. No matter how cynical it sounds, believe me, it won’t lose it.

“Work on your resume, especially if you don’t have experience and there’s nothing to fill out with a resume.”

It’s better to start by asking “how to write resume” on YouTube and watch 50 hours of videos on this topic to really understand how to do this. Resume writing has its own established traditions, established formulations, formats, forbidden words and phrases – in short, this is also a kind of “special Olympics” (especially in the USA). Your resume writing skills and your professional skills are completely orthogonal things.

"Learn to look at a task from different points of view in order to understand what a business and a user want."

Bullshit. If you are not a UX specialist and not an analyst, then learn to understand what your immediate superiors want from you. And his superiors. And the bosses of his bosses. Drop out of your head any thoughts “how much will the maintenance of this cost?”, “Will users like this?”, “And how much money will this feature bring to the company?”. This is all rubbish, turbidity and compote. To think about business – the business has founders. And while you are not on the board of directors and you do not have company shares or shares in the authorized capital – well, you understand. Think about what the immediate superiors want from you. In my experience, few are fired for low qualifications and bugs. And certainly no one was fired for the reason “he didn’t do what our users wanted.” But for “you don’t fit into the team” and conflicts with the management – all the same.