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1.
Programmers are the astronauts of our time, literally everyone wants to become them: the profession seems fashionable, promising and highly paid. The most interesting thing is that the cult extends not only to schoolchildren, students and their parents, but also to companies. An interesting fad has been forming since 2015: all companies tend to call themselves an IT company. Banks, retail, online stores and even pizzerias position themselves precisely as technological. Here, a substitution of concepts takes place: if a company is armed with cool technologies and provides technological services to its customers, it is not an IT company, but banks, retailers, restaurants, advanced in terms of technical transformation. An IT company is still those organizations that design, implement, develop and support technologies: hosting, data centers, software developers, hardware manufacturers,system integrators, etc.
Nevertheless, "IT companies" sometimes have much more opportunities and attract the best developers and engineers to build their IT infrastructure.
In contrast to the best and most experienced specialists, there is an army of very strange personalities who consider themselves programmers, but strictly speaking they are not. Their species diversity is amazing, every time you discover something new in communication with these guys, but there are especially numerous and typical groups.
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With education in the IT field, something is happening: mythology runs counter to practice, and at the exit, the market ranges from insecure, competent professionals to dodgers who have watched the course and are ready to compete for the best positions in companies. This is such a painful part that I propose to consider the features of IT education right on the points - each is like a corn on the heart.
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- Online courses, schools, universities are a colossal part of the industry that looks like a gentleman in a tailcoat who hasn't washed for three months. It seems decent, but upon closer acquaintance - damn it! Yes, good and even eminent teachers, intelligible and step-by-step programs, but this is a low level of training, not commensurate with the money spent. It's better to spend this time watching MIT courses and active self-study.
Despite the disadvantages, the good news is that almost anyone can find an education for their level of training and their needs. But, as with any learning, much of your success depends on self-preparation, self-education, and discipline.
Salary collider
The patches in the IT market are overheated, in large part because non-IT companies have the resources to race after developers. A conditional bank is ready to pay much more for a ready-made backend programmer than a conditional search engine or a software developer who would prefer to grow himself a developer from a junior. Design companies and outsourcing companies (especially foreign ones) pay even more. Programmers feel like new rock stars, and now the jerk graduate, after graduating from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics with a 0.5 year testing experience, throws his legs up and down and demands "a hundred" clean.
For some reason, both businesses and job seekers forget that salary is not an auction rate, but a share of the value you have created for the company. And if June sits and shit codes one function for a week, actively scamming pieces of code across all forums and sites, he does not deserve the coveted hundred, because the value he created does not pull even a dozen.
The availability of remote development also plays a significant role: why go to the office, communicate, build up skills, if you can code "from now on" remotely for a metropolitan company, which is 100 thousand - no question. At the same time, a significant part of developers voluntarily fall into the trap with a low ceiling: by creating code and receiving a sufficient amount now, they do not develop outside the company, do not develop software design skills, and remain specialists who are able to quickly write good code. Sooner or later, their personal ceiling comes, and in order to break it, you need to change jobs and often go to lower wages. The same problem occurs with some sysadmins - DevOps and cloud computing, along with incredible remote capabilities, have brought overheating and ceiling situations.
Black holes of the IT world
There are black holes among real IT companies - they gather all more or less intelligent developers, offering good wages and conditions. However, these are, as a rule, large companies that are engaged in custom project development and at any time return to the labor market not only individual specialists, but also entire teams. It is they who are largely involved in the creation of the mentioned salary collider.
Such a situation is bad because excellent specialists are pulled out of stable permanent projects due to material motivation, who are immersed in the project, have grown within it and are useful. And then these specialists jump from project to project, where they waste their architectural skill and are essentially cool coders. There are two ways out: to play outbid or look for other methods of motivation. It is almost impossible for a small company to cope with this.
Introvert, disgusting character
Each community has its own culture: a set of symbols, habits, characteristics that can be generically extended to each member of the community. Sometimes it takes the form of a stereotype: admins are with cats, beards and in an old sweater, testers are all hackers, programmers are boring bores with glasses with atrophied muscles, etc. This state of affairs turns out to be quite harmful, especially for fanatical beginners who strive not only to correspond professionally, but also to enter the image - for example, to become a silent introvert and basically communicate only with a computer.
I had to attend one very large IT conference with a nice young girl programmer from our city. She was a typical comic book programmer back then: zero hairstyles and haircuts, glasses, silence, a frown, and quick, quick confused speech when talking about development. She got used to this professional mask. Imagine her surprise when she saw live completely different programmers: chatty, humorous, pumped up, enthusiastically chatting about dances and books, loving beer, cakes and chocolate and at the same time making powerful reports at sessions. But there were others like her - silent introverts who just got used to being them.
The profession always leaves an imprint on the character and lifestyle of a person, there are almost no exceptions. But this does not mean that you need to bring yourself to some common denominator. Your character is your added value in the profession: if you are a chatty extrovert, you can work with clients and collect requirements for development; if you are a workaholic, you will perform difficult and painstaking work; if you are a disciplined diplomat, you will quickly become a team leader, etc. I don't like this phrase, but here it is appropriate: being yourself today is more valuable than ever.
Do you know the answers to these questions? People want to know :-)
Chapter 2. Business environment
Bounty hunters
Of course, on the battlefield for IT specialists, an important role is assigned to HR specialists who have long outgrown the standard HR position and turned into HR, HR specialists, DevRel (specialists in relations with developers and internal HR PR), etc. Some companies even have separate HR hires for R&D and separate HR for everything else. They do not disdain by any means, just to achieve their goal and get a specialist, but ... they often ruin their own business at interviews (by requests to write the code on a piece of paper, "speak in english with me", questions from the first positions of Google's issuance and psychological puzzles).
Hiring is carried out at conferences and meetups (what do you think they are arranged for?), In private chats, in communities on social networks, on specialized sites, etc. So if you are looking for a job and suddenly you are suddenly called from all directions, you should know that your HR is probably employing you. As soon as you get a job in a company (especially in a large one), you are immediately surrounded by care and attention not by a mentor, who is necessary for a successful start, but by an internal PR specialist who walks around the office, shows bowls of sweets and fruits, gives slippers and pays attention that the company logo embroidered or printed on them, as it were, hints about involvement in the great.
For some reason they do not understand that the main stress of a new employee does not come from uncomfortable slippers or sad fish in the aquarium, but from the difficulty of entering the workflow, development rules, code style, project features, etc. The employee orientation (informing the newcomer) should include, first of all, familiarization with the responsibilities, functional features of the position, with the team members (first of all, those related to work tasks). And at the first stage, the most valuable person is not a formal one, but an included colleague-mentor in profile activities, who will explain everything, teach everything, explain and painlessly include in the development. And slippers from IKEA will do.
In general, offices are another story. Companies strive to build some kind of incredible corporate Disneylands with gyms and so on, if only the employee would like to stay in the office as long as possible and hold on to the environment. However, for example, in three very large companies I have seen anything, including sleeping capsules and massage chairs in SPA rooms, but at the same time, the company has very limited medical care, both in terms of voluntary health insurance and in terms of internal medical care. That is, in the office on 4 floors, employees cannot count on prompt assistance - an ambulance solves issues of urgent health problems. And yes, many guys say that they are sorry to part with convenience, so they do not move to a more interesting project for more interesting money.
A separate squad for IT specialists is hunted by recruitment agencies that are able to sell a not very high-quality employee to their clients as super senior. In principle, the rule is simple: a good specialist in any field very rarely becomes an object of relations with an agency, he is able to find a job on his own. And the agents themselves are not discouraged - receiving a refusal from the next "target" developer, they do not hesitate to ask for the contacts of colleagues or friends who are looking for work or even "whom you would like to employ in another company" (this, I understand, motivation is to find a job a competing colleague and clear a career path!).
And, by the way, there are many programmers in the labor market, and there is no one to fill vacancies. A common situation for a "fashionable" direction.
Wallet hunters
Well, since IT professionals earn a lot, why not find three thousand ways to honestly take this money. Accordingly, on the basis of general IT fanaticism, a whole industry has emerged that offers paid and too paid services. I will list some of them.
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Of course, it is very cool to listen to good speakers, selected reports (here the program committees do not let you down), to learn about other people's projects, but the problem is that this is just a hangout, rarely when it is possible to drag some heard decision into production or at least accept it as an idea - the maximum that comes out is to take a closer look at the technology and speculatively try it on for your project. Nevertheless, it is conferences and festivals that most actively claim part of your salary, since they position themselves partly as a practically valuable event, partly as an elite club. Although in reality everything is much more prosaic.
And the covid made its own adjustments. The question is, for how long?
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- Publishing houses of professional literature. There are awesome foreign and domestic publishing houses that publish great books (I will single out "Peter" as the best of the Russian ones), and there are publishers that do not very good translations, publish not the best domestic works and at the same time actively promote themselves as the best assistants on the path of becoming team lead, project manager, lead developer. Only an internal filter helps here: flip through the book, read reviews, assess the importance of the content.
I even had to see separate services for blood analysis and health checkup for IT people. This is, of course, absolute marketing, but why not hit the trend. Any commercial company loves to get into trends, because there are gold veins inside.
Idea hunters
This is probably the most controversial point of all listed in this article. It concerns numerous hackathons, where developers are tasked with making something cool and coherent. As a result, the organizers receive a bunch of ideas, ready-made MVPs, prototypes and future employees. And they get these profits at a very small price, in fact - for nothing. When participating in a hackathon, you should always remember that your best ideas have already been sown and will certainly be used in one form or another.
However, I have already said that this is a controversial point. The fact is that hackathons are a useful thing for developers: you work quickly, efficiently, on a specific task, in a team of equally strong and interesting guys. At the start of a career, this is a necessary, interesting experience. And sometimes a hackathon becomes the only way to announce yourself out loud and even find an investor. In general, it is worth participating, not forgetting to defend ideas (for this there are lawyers for IT specialists).
Sharks total
The established industry “saved” many specialists who, due to their education, were doomed to a dubious future. Yes, I'm talking about our beloved antagonists - humanitarians. I remember, in 2002-2007. the applicants already understood what they were headed for, and were afraid to enter the philological faculty, the foreign language, the pedagogical, believing that this promises them a hopeless future. But less than 10 years have passed and all these sharks of pen and language have found themselves in HR, the IT translation environment (techs, marketers, salespeople), in copywriting (content management, editing blogs and blogs on content platforms), in event management (organizers numerous events), especially arrogant and self-confident climbed into project management. And all this is the same IT sphere.
What's wrong with that, you ask? The guys perform important work tasks. That's right, it is. But among them there are a large number of those who do not even try to understand information technology and, for example, wraps up cool articles because of several tongue-tied sentences, makes creepy technical translations, sells without understanding the technical nuances and customer requirements "for luck", turns competent Agile and Scrum into a nursery, but strictly obligatory game with a board and pieces of paper, takes up time on various of its initiatives, such as joint office meetings, quizzes and other garbage that is arranged after work, but is as obligatory as a Scrum board. These guys write complex questionnaires and initiate psychological and motivational certification of techies, talk about burnout and toxicity, but they are not particularly ready to offer solutions.Where does the charge of this vigorous activity come from? It's simple: each of them is active in order to demonstrate their activities, need and value for the company. Alas, it is often at the expense of professionals who administer, write code, design, test and absolutely do not want to fill out 127 questions of the questionnaire about the softness of chairs, dining room and relationships with colleagues. Because there will be a check mark on the certification project, but the chairs will remain uncomfortable, colleagues will be conflicted, the dining room will be so-so.Because there will be a check mark on the certification project, but the chairs will remain uncomfortable, colleagues will be conflicted, the dining room will be so-so.Because there will be a check mark on the certification project, but the chairs will remain uncomfortable, colleagues will be conflicted, the dining room will be so-so.
I know very worthy devrels, HRs, techs, editors, journalists, translators, and even internal PR specialists who not only entered IT, they are in it with their heads. But to count them, the fingers of two hands are enough.
Chapter 3. Login to IT
Imaginary simplicity
It seems that working in IT is easy. In fact, what is it? All programming languages have a very limited number of commands and quite intelligible syntax, the tasks of the system administrator are also finite, not to mention the testers - you think, use the program and look for bugs. This is exactly what you think when you go to your first year of university or a course at a corporate university to change your specialty. And after a while, you lie on the keyboard and almost cry, because the compiler issued 314 Errors, the bash command does not exist, the PowerShell script does the wrong thing or does nothing, and to top it all off, you assigned the entire audience 127.0.0.1 via DHCP. And there is no turning back, and this is only the beginning.
Yes, it is relatively easy to learn how to rivet sites on a CMS, make simple mobile applications, but ask yourself the question - how much is in demand by the market and what will be the competition among such freelance craftsmen?
In-demand and classy specialists go a difficult and long way: every topic, every programming language, any objects of administration conceal thousands of nuances, the understanding of which sometimes comes after many years of study and work. At the same time, the only way to advance in your specialty is daily practice, working with code, with hardware, with networks. Even after reading all the books, from Schildt to Tanenbaum, you cannot become a professional if you just read and do nothing with your hands, do not "feel" the compiler, operating system settings, do not understand algorithms, patterns, etc.
Alas, the myth about the ease of entering IT will continue to grow, largely thanks to numerous programming schools that are ready for your money and your time to convince you that you are already a labor coder and that the sky-high salary is almost credited to the card. The most surprising thing is that the mentioned HRs are often delighted with the presence of such certificates, it works according to the principle "whoa, how motivated a person is and how he forced himself to start studying at 33". I witnessed an absolutely amazing story, how a guy with seven years of experience in an IT project was not hired as a project manager in a large regional IT company, but gave preference to a girl without a single day of experience in IT, who at an interview told that she was taking a JavaScript course in one from online schools. She dropped out of the course, but the work with pay above the market remained.
Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
Yes, there are developers who receive 200, 300, and even 500 thousand per month. As a rule, these are guys with some unique combination of skills - for example, computer vision specialists, mathematicians-developers of neural networks, cool specialists in relatively rare programming languages, enterprise gurus, etc. But there are not many of them. For positions of the middle level, it is often “more profitable” for money to be a project manager, sales manager, etc., that is, to occupy managerial positions.
Yes, programmers receive wages higher than the market average, but such a profession requires incomparably more labor costs and abilities. In fact, it is continuous, intense intellectual work. Otherwise, it will not work out well, it will turn out below average in every sense. Relatively speaking, if you are now 35, you get 60-80 thousand rubles, working as a manager for something, line manager or engineer, and you decide to go to IT (development), then you will come to your salary level in 2 at least a year. And for these two years you will study and train like an ordinary junior.
In addition, there is nothing romantic about the profession of a programmer, tester, or system administrator (here both DevOps and networkers, etc.). As soon as you immerse yourself in the work, you will notice that the same routine is everywhere as elsewhere, only it applies to other processes. And to a varied and interesting position of a team leader, system architect, software designer, you still need to grow, and then, provided you have the desire and ability to do this.
Startup is a false start
IT startups are a separate story that is also shaping the industry. They include almost any newly opened company. Here's what they are.
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So, these startups relate very specifically to hiring personnel: for example, in the phase of actively attracting investments, they can “take away” a developer for a lot of money, and in six months they can close or simply get rid of 90% of the staff, because investments have dried up, and the product does not take off. ... Moreover, it happens that programmers work at the lowest conditions in anticipation of a quick conquest of the market and, as a result, are forced to leave with nothing and look for work.
Chapter 4. What will happen next?
Where the industry will grow
Contrary to the horror stories about robots, the IT sphere will not collapse or disappear (someone needs to design and program robots!), But on the contrary, it will take even more place in our life. However, just being a developer will become more boring and materially sadder - the market will have a growing demand for "chimeras", that is, for specialists who combine the ability to make good code and possession of specialization (for example, in commerce and advertising, developers with an understanding of marketing and programmatics, in medicine - biotech specialists, medical cybernetics and just programmers with a biological, chemical or medical education, in linguistics, not philologists are needed, but programmers with an understanding and knowledge of linguistics, etc.).
For example, at one of the conferences an interesting market request was made: there are still no normal, high-quality software translators for business purposes and work with technical documentation. It is clear that a team will cope with such a task with a deep understanding of all facets of this issue: from translation theory to the actual development tasks.
Industries need everything
Oddly enough, the industry really needs everything: super developers with strong skills in mathematics, algorithms and programming, and web designers from the plow, and monkey coders, and testers of all levels, and sysadmins of all kinds. Another thing is that the growth conditions, tasks, prospects and income are very different. And this opportunity gap will continue to grow.
Which **** made this request ?!
Education must change
The IT education that exists now will have to change, otherwise it will completely lose its popularity and relevance (and even the army will not save). In education, there should be an emphasis on practical exercises, on learning to work with sources, on programs at the intersection of specialties - lecturing on manuals from the 90s, “quasi” computer science faculties and short-term courses should gradually become a thing of the past.
I think that in the near future the importance of corporate universities will grow dramatically. Already today, many companies train specialists for free in order to select the best for themselves. But you need to understand that the “not the best” will also acquire skills and be able to change their career path or understand that a particular technology is not theirs. This is a very cool opportunity and a direct threat to classical education (so far almost imperceptible, but time goes on).
Technologies will change little
Today there are technologies for almost everything - any idea of yours will easily find its own technology stack. It is unlikely that something will actively change in the environment of programming languages, it will fundamentally move in the network infrastructure, on the web, in the enterprise. Programmers trained today, with a relatively stable interest in developing their stack, will be in demand both in 5 years and in 10 years. In addition, many products will require support and maintenance for a long time (and yes, today's modern, cool and clean code is likely to be hemorrhoid legacy in 10 years ;-) Just think!).
Technology will explode
Everything related to mobile development, neural networks, artificial intelligence, VR / AR and IoT will change at a tremendous speed. Many modern implementations are imperfect and it is clear that development is looking for new ways to solve the complex problems of each of these technologies. The development of mobile development will be determined by the change in the form factors of gadgets: flexible screens will require innovation. Thus, soon we will face a break in the usual stack. Being one of the first to master new techniques is truly promising, interesting and undoubtedly profitable.
IT will become pop
If 3-4 years ago the IT sphere was a new rock and formed just such an industry subculture, today it is almost pop. This evolution has occurred due to the fact that the culture for IT specialists is less and less formed by the IT specialists themselves, more and more masters of events, shows, cult-mass work, and so on are connected. It is these guys who will create the outer shell of our complex and intelligent industry, and it is very possible that the industry will look like Einstein's brain was shoved into a concert clown costume and put to work. This is not good and not bad, the only consequence of this situation is that the outward attractiveness of the industry for the broad masses who want to enter IT after a two-month online course will be even greater, which means that salary gaps will worsen, the quality of management will decrease and new difficulties will arise when working with customers. ...Well, we are no strangers.
The cycle will resume
Sooner or later, a critical mass of the described problems will accumulate and the industry will come to leveling out some of the mistakes it has made. Requirements for professionals will change, the value of practical experience will grow, employers will reject everyone who came not to create value, but to take resources. As a result, the IT industry will qualitatively change and form as a broad professional community that is not ready to accept weak and unprepared “entrants” (this will be something like a model of medicine, which is not so easy to enter). And this is an interesting evolution in every sense.
I reread the text - it turned out gloomily ... In principle, I look into the future of IT in particular and high technologies in general with great optimism. In any scenario of the development of world politics and economy (except for the destruction of the world - fantastic is so fantastic, even as of June 2020), a technological step back is no longer possible: more and more elements of our daily life and work will be based on more and more advanced technologies. Hardware will need to be designed, interfaces to design, code to write - in one form or another. Therefore, there will be an interesting labor market, there will be different salaries, there will be requests and there will be demand for everything that has been done. To live and live in the IT sphere and I will not say pretentious words about what it should be, we determine. We are all human and Maslow's eternal pyramid works for us,therefore, it will not work to change something for the idea - only if it is very local. But we can do something else - do our job with dignity and honesty. This will really determine the state of the industry. And those who make a pop reality show out of the industry will remain tinsel. They just do their job too.
Let's discuss?