To twist or not to twist?

In our exciting journey through the world of IT, we are faced with many challenges and opportunities. One of the most discussed topics today is experience boosting. It is gaining more and more popularity every day and I never imagined that this topic would create such a stir.

I recently learned about a community of people offering an easy way to get into the IT industry. The most difficult stage on this path is the interview process. After completing it, you will receive the coveted offer and dream job. For a beginner who is just starting out, this may seem like an ideal solution.

In general, I am not against this idea if a person really goes through an inconvenient, closed system, but then still becomes a specialist who copes with his tasks. For example, I am one of those developers who were able to learn on their own without receiving a higher education. Now, I still decided to close this gestalt and am finishing my 5th year at a university in my profession. So I partly understand people who are looking for any opportunity for their success.

However, several recent events have caused me to reconsider my opinion about this situation. Without mentioning names, I will tell you what happened.

Story 1

I sometimes conduct real and test interviews for guys who want to try themselves in real projects. Practice, so to speak. And this guy came to me. We conducted a test Call and talked for about an hour on various Android topics. Both on basic Java, Kotlin, and on the system itself, and we touched a little on Compose. The guy behaved confidently, although his resume raised some doubts in me. It indicated work experience at Sberbank, where I myself do not even try to get an interview due to the high complexity of the selection.

This guy passed the test interview much more confidently than other candidates. Even if he didn’t know something in detail, he behaved like a person who knows. He answered questions confidently and demonstrated a good understanding of the topics.

Do you know what he told me after? It turned out that he is not an Android developer at all. He trained with a mentor, went through the same test interviews and learned his legend. Although it seemed strange to me that Sberbank could have one-time projects that end with the dissolution of a team of smart developers, he became proficient in theory. So even the experienced guys looked weaker compared to him.

Conclusion

This story once again convinced me how important public speaking and self-presentation skills are. They can significantly influence decision making during an interview. Regardless of your level of technical knowledge, being able to present yourself and your skills confidently and clearly can make all the difference in your interview success. It is important not only to know the theory, but also to be able to present it correctly.

Story 2

Not long ago I got a job. As before as an android developer. I know from experience that the first few weeks are when you just begin to get the hang of what project you’ve landed on. You get access and logins to various services. Sometimes you can’t download a project due to VPN access. In general, companies where onboarding is quick and painless have invested a lot of time and effort into it.

It was the same at my current place. In addition to being an Android project, it is also an AOSP (Android open source project). We have our own image of the Android system, which we can change and customize. So, setting up such a project on your local machine is not an easy task. The image itself with all the repositories weighs about 500 gigabytes. It has a bunch of repositories. So, in addition to the Android studio itself, you also need to have skills in working with Git and the command line. Anywhere something can go wrong. So I greatly improved my Linux skills in the first few weeks of working on such a project.

Another guy settled down with me. For the same position as a senior with about 4 years of experience. And he also sounded very confident on general calls and when communicating. But he couldn't do anything. For every step that I went through myself, I tried to guide him. Understanding that his grade may be lower, and besides, in principle, I believe in mutual assistance and try to stick together. However, about 2 weeks passed, and he still could not assemble the project. Somehow I made a problem to fix the bug. Moreover, it is not clear whether it is on a working project or what. And a month later I found out that he was fired.

By this time, I was already able to transfer the build process of the project I was working on from the soong system to Gradle. Which was an achievement for me. But when I found out that he did nothing, I was surprised, to put it mildly. And my colleagues naturally became suspicious. Why a person successfully passes an interview, the company spends a lot of time and money on the onboarding process. But in the end, these efforts do not pay off. Suspicions about cheating the experience were confirmed by the fact that he deleted all correspondence, including mine with him, from Telegram.

Conclusion

This story clearly illustrates how important it is not only to have self-presentation skills and confidently pass interviews, but also to actually possess the necessary technical knowledge and skills. Ultimately, true ability and experience always come through in the work. Companies can spend a lot of resources on onboarding, but if a candidate doesn't meet the stated skills, it becomes obvious very quickly. True professionalism lies in the ability not only to speak, but also to do.

General conclusion

Both of these stories taught me important lessons that broadened my horizons. After all, working in one place, you can form an opinion about the world by looking at it from the keyhole. And seeing such different situations first-hand, I see how much my industry is changing. New people come and they do not follow the path that society gives them. They break fences and break into someone else's garden. And IT is an area where this may not become clear immediately. And there may be many such attempts. So you need to be a little more vigilant.

Personally, I am somewhere in the middle, seeing both sides of this situation. And I understand the possible risks of organizations and the desire of people to quickly get through an unpleasant and difficult stage. Share in the comments what you think about this.