Yandex.Practicum and “entering IT”

Why did I choose Yandex.Praktikum from the variety of courses? I carefully watched the programs, and the Workshop was adequate in terms of how much technology was planned to be learned during the training period (10 months). Competitors included in mail.ru (which is now VK) was not considered by me due to a bias towards the company, the courses of other competitors (and the Workshop itself) I downloaded from sites with folds and scrolled diagonally. What I saw at Yandex I liked the most.

In June 2020, he paid in full (90,000 rubles at that time) for the entire course, which I do not recommend… Pay monthly, if you decide to quit after 3-4 months, you will not need to issue a refund. I do not have exact numbers of how many people started to study and how many reached the end of the course, because I myself took an academic leave 3 times and changed 3 streams, but it feels like about 1/3 of the students go through the course until the end. But again, I may be wrong, this is my subjective assessment “by eye”.

Training program – This is 15 two-week sprints and a 5-week thesis at the end. Learn HTML / CSS, JavaScript and MERN stack. It is possible to go to the academy 2 or 3 times (depending on the stream, I had 3, on new streams like 2). One sprint contains theory, tasks in the simulator and practical work, which is checked by the reviewers, and which must be submitted with all corrected comments by the end of the sprint. If you do not have time, then go to the academy, if you run out of academies, you are expelled. Not all deadlines are hard, there are soft ones, but they also depend on the flow, the “hardness” of the deadlines changes. The finished thesis project looks like So…

About the review of practical work. In my opinion, this is what the tuition fees are paid for. They look at your code, comment clearly (most often), say what to fix. For me, it was practical work and their verification that carried the greatest value in training. 2 times I had to take an academic, because I did not have time to meet the deadline. Once again I took Academic for health reasons, and here I must thank the curator of the stream for meeting me halfway and allowing me to take Academic for 2 months, because in 1 month I might not have time to recover. By the way, I managed to google some of the reviewers, they were mostly graduates of the Workshop.

Theory… Given by text, it may be worse than written in learn.javascript.ru, but with humor and not boring. To support the theory, the book “JavaScript: The Definitive Guide” by David Flanagan was bought + several courses on udemy, which I usually looked at in advance, that is, before starting a new topic, I already tried to read / look about it, so the material was absorbed better than if be limited to the theory of the Workshop.

“Spend an average of 15 hours per week on classes.” – I copied this from the landing page of the program, and this is my main complaint about the Workshop. Because it is NOT TRUE. The first 2 sprints I was able to fit into 15 hours a week, because they are simple, and the last 3 sprints too (there are the basics of the backend for front-end developers, I had experience with node, express, DB, nginx), although many other students they experienced problems and took academies. But all the other sprints took me 20-30 hours a week, sprints 8 and 9 (“JavaScript are difficult concepts”) are generally a full 40 hours a week, and it was from them that I left for the academy. And how should people with zero experience and full-time work go through these sprints?

And here there is an interesting question: can we blame the Practicum for actually taking more than 15 hours a week to study the program? On the one hand, yes, because 15 hours are stated on the landing page. But on the other hand, is it really possible to master a profession demanded by the market in 10 months, 15 hours a week? I don’t think so. You need to either spend more hours per week, or study on your own at a lower pace for 2-3 years. “Log in to IT in 10 months” sounds like “learn English in 12 weeks”, but for the target audience of such courses this is not obvious. It is good to understand js + react in 10 months, having before that zero or near-zero development experience, only a few will succeed, and these are most likely those people who are good at everything, because they are quite hardworking and purposeful. And I suppose that they would have succeeded without the courses, maybe it would have taken more time, maybe it would have been more difficult, but they would have succeeded anyway. This is probably the most important paragraph of the post for those who want to enter IT. The task is many times more complicated than how Yandex marketers and their colleagues from other educational projects try to present it. Learning at the Workshop will be almost as independent learning as learning without a Workshop, that is, through books, videos on youtube and cheap video courses with udemy and analogues. No one will put knowledge and skills in their heads, they will give some structure for this and motivation in terms of the fact that a lot of money has been paid and there is a risk of expulsion. Well, reviews will be in the case of the Workshop, this is also useful.

Online simulator. The developers of the curriculum tried to make the tasks interesting, at least within the framework of their formulation, if the task itself could not be made interesting. BUT! Over 15 sprints, I came across 10 tasks in total, for which I wrote the correct solution, but the validator did not accept them. Sometimes I spent several hours to understand what was wrong, rewrote the solution in different ways, by the end of the course I came to the conclusion that I simply dropped a decision into Slack that the validator did not accept, and the mentor said what to fix so that the validator would accept. If the course was cheaper, I would close my eyes to it, but for 90k this is a failure, there are no such problems on free freeCodeCamp and cheap Java Rush. The workshop wrote in his blog that they analyze how much time students spend on average on each task, and edit those that take too much time, but I studied on the 26th stream, and in 26 streams they did not have time to fix everything … Plus there were also moments when the simulator simply did not work for me, chatting with the support did not lead to anything, the simulator “came to life” itself after a while. The backend for design work 7-12 also lay down.

Mentor, Senior Student, Curator, Slack. All communication within the learning process takes place in Slack. Many students do not like it, people complain that everything is poorly structured, but in general it was convenient for me. A mentor is the second reason to pay for a course. For each group of 60-80 people a mentor is given, with him a separate channel is created in the slack. My group had a good mentor (Sergei Konstantinov), he tried to promptly answer questions. Sometimes I answered with links to stackoverflow, but answered correctly to correctly formulated questions. That is, the mentor will not look for an error in the student’s code and will not fix it himself (I sometimes did this when I was asked to help with the code in PM), but he will tell you which way to look, discard what to read. You can ask the mentor what the reviewer wants from you, if you do not understand this yourself from his comments, you can also contact the reviewer through him if you disagree with something. In general, this is a helpful person in the learning process. The senior student also occasionally answered questions in Slack. Academies go through the curator, bargaining for additional days to the deadline, because the simulator or the server of the project work was lying, general organizational issues. I have no complaints about the curator, everything is ok.

Webinars. By and large, they are useless, one of the mentors tells the theory, shows examples of code on it, sometimes prompts something about the project work. I only watched sprints 7-9 in full, because it was difficult with the project work.

Career track. Useful information on how to look for a job, write a resume, arrange a portfolio.

On the plus side, I note that the Workshop actively collects feedback from students and makes changes to the program.

Total. Personally, I am pleased with the training at the Workshop. I had a specific goal: I paid for the training solely to motivate myself to learn js + React: 90 thousand plus I really didn’t want to be expelled. The Workshop coped with this task.

If you have zero experience in development, you haven’t tried to buy any course on udemy and make all the assignments from it, didn’t have time to understand that it may not be yours, and you are working fulltime work, and you want to leave from her to it with high salaries – I do not recommend that you study at Yandex.Practicum or analogs. You will most likely get frustrated and fail.

You can try from cheap courses on Udemy, do projects after the teacher, then try to do this project again, but no longer looking into the course or into the finished code, but using only Google and documentation. Now, if after that the desire to study further does not disappear, then you can consider the Workshop and other expensive courses.

“Entering IT from scratch in 15 hours a week in 10 months” is a difficult task, and a paid course will help you with it, but not that much. I would compare it to learning English – it takes a strong desire and a lot of time. It is difficult to fit the amount of work in several years into 10 months.

After the course, I did not try to look for a job. Firstly, I have not yet decided whether I want to work in it, and secondly, before going to interviews, I need to thoroughly prepare. In addition to what was in the program of the Workshop, at least redux, typescript are needed, it is necessary to tighten the theory on the basics of the language and questions on es6.

I hope my post was useful to you, thanks for your attention.