In 11th grade, I took courses for the CISCO certification. I, as always and everywhere, was the youngest in the group. Uncles were sitting around - heads of IT departments, and I was 16 years old.
We had a very cool instructor - Sergey Petukhov. We communicated well with him, and he talked about how difficult it is to get the last level of CCIE. It is taken in Brussels, in the laboratory. They bring me there for 8 days, give a huge test for theory and a real problem: "Here is the hardware, the attitude is this scheme, do as you think is right."
Sergei complained that in Russia it is difficult to gain practice in working with network glands. They are expensive, and then only the big operators of the Big Three had them. If you work with networks there, you will be able to gain the necessary level of knowledge and experience. If you don't work, you can't.
Sergei had a friend who worked at MTS, and he constantly said: “Sergei, the problem is that you teach. You only know well the theory. " The friend was, on the contrary, a first-class practitioner.
Then it seemed to me that this is really a matter of choice - that you are good either in theory or in practice, that you either work yourself or teach others.
But the point is that neither one nor the other could go and pass the CCIE.
So I thought that it was impossible to combine
When I was engaged in networking, everything was built from practice. I read an article about the IP protocol and tried to understand how it works - but nifiga did not understand why I needed all this. Then I started configuring routes, AP-tables, routing, BGP. Having gained practice, I re-read the article about IP - and here it all came together.
Everything that was written in theory resonated with practice. Since then, I've always tried it first, then read how it works.
But many years later, when I quit working for hire and started doing my own projects, I found myself in a strange situation. On the one hand, I had a team of devops, we took orders and set up automation for companies. A case for pure practitioners. On the other hand, I started teaching and teaching people. Doing what I thought theorists were better at.
I suddenly became both my instructor Sergei and his practicing friend. They both lacked each other's skills, and I decided to combine everything in myself. But with practice I was at ease - and teaching turned out to be completely unknown territory for me.
In 2018, we started holding the first webinars - and we constantly dogged ourselves.
I sold all the deadlines because I was very afraid to perform - although only 10-15 people listened to me
It was very difficult. I really stepped over myself. People around have always talked about it - most people do not want to perform anywhere because they are afraid.
But then they go out to the audience and get a huge boost of energy and emotions. It changes everything. The same happened for me. The response is very spurring, and very quickly it becomes boring to live without it.
Now it seems to me that those who do not perform and do not teach people out of fear are missing out on a very large layer of interesting life. Communicating with people, trying to raise them to a new level or telling basic things is a gigantic charge of emotions. I'm surprised how rarely there are people who really love to teach and do it cool ( write to us if you are like that, at least we will meet).
In fact, it only sounds beautiful. The audience's reaction is pleasing and overwhelming for the first time, but the emotions pass.
And when you regularly combine work and teaching, serious questions start to arise before you.
And one of the first - what for?
Now I have every day broken by the clock, and I change my mask every hour. In the morning - a planning meeting on tasks, then you need to work as a gender specialist, look at contracts, sign pieces of paper. Then an hour - to be devops, set up another automation. Another hour to work as a therapist and reassure colleagues, because there again something fell. Then you need to prepare for the webinar for an hour and spend another hour. Then you need to be a methodologist and work on a course for corporate training.
If I had been told about five years ago that my day would look like this, I would have been quite alert. How to take out such a frantic pace ?!
Now I live in it, and I saw one big plus that I had not thought about before - there is no routine in my life at all. If you believe that the best rest is a change of activity, then here is the answer why I am not so overwhelmed.
In general, the story about the lack of time turned out to be a myth for me - but in reality, little has changed. Our industry is such that you have to constantly learn in it. Among my acquaintances and acquaintances, there is not a single person who simply does the work, and then does not touch anything admin until the next morning.
Everyone is always reading something, looking, figuring out, sawing for themselves, experimenting. And I realized that doing curriculum is simply the coolest way to learn for yourself.
I came to this unconsciously - I just could not deny myself the things that I wanted to do. I had such a thing that the work turned into a constant routine - you set up the same thing everywhere - nginx, kuers and everything else. And then suddenly you come across a cool little utility or some kind of architecture that works perfectly. You don't just want to apply it - you just want to tell everyone about it. Show people how you can do better.
That is, teaching saved me from boredom and routine. And it makes me happy - I tell people about things that I like.
My problems did not start because of time and effort. The trouble was different:
The main burden of teaching is responsibility
For example, I never liked Kubernetes, but I had to conduct webinars on it. It is cumbersome, there are a bunch of features that, damn, nobody uses. I like products with a clear purpose and I do not like things in which only 20% is used, and the rest is needed by one person every hundred years. For me, this is an overloaded system. The more moving parts, the more errors there can be.
I had a good idea of how it works in practice, because I constantly used it on projects. But he did not love - and that's it. Because of this, teaching was difficult - from a moral point of view in the first place. It always seemed to me that because of my attitude I might miss and not give something important. On the other hand, at the webinars, I myself understood Coober much better and began to treat him more loyal.
And then I realized - I understood more deeply in Kubera when I taught him than when I was solving work problems. At that moment I remembered how my instructor was reproached for allegedly burying himself by teaching. So that's it.
The fact that teaching inhibits your development as a professional is complete nonsense.
Pure lies.
For example, I have a planned webinar where I have to talk about the reception of events at Klickhaus. I know the topic partially - I know about sharding, I can roughly imagine that I have an application that accepts jason. It has nginx in front of it. But I'm like, "Damn, they'll ask me one hundred percent about SSL and how to configure it at the endpoint."
And I begin to dig deeper into this topic, understand the TLS protocol, and begin to understand why they do SSL termination on dedicated nodes. Accordingly, both asymmetric and symmetric encryption are used there.I'm starting to figure out how certificate validation takes place and much more.
That is, I took and pumped - simply because I was preparing for the performance
And if, for example, you need to read a story on a topic related to yours, in which you do not understand much? This is not a job where you do everything in roundabout ways, as best you can. Here you cannot lose face.
For example, you program in "pluses" and talk about C ++ too. But you should not tell about the "pluses" themselves and their general structure, but, for example, how to load an external coulter there and use the functions from it. And you are like this: "On the ground, I miss a lot of time, but I have never actively encountered openers." And you need to tell.
Well, that's all - I went, figured it out, ran a couple of tests and told. And pumped again. If it had not been for the webinar, I would never have known about them.
Therefore, in any case, when you teach, you upgrade, structure your knowledge. You can't tell people randomly. You supplement some topics, study them in order to tell in more detail or to sharpen your attention.
You always answer questions and you know the answers.
If I didn't have my company, I would still go to interviews - and I would definitely not worry in front of any of them anymore.
It's a simple story. When you are preparing to tell people about the technology, you study it so deeply that it becomes simply unrealistic to flunk you on a job interview. Most likely, you know more than the person who is interviewing you - after all, he only practices. And you, both practice and theory, know the most distant and dark corners of technology.
Moreover, when I started teaching, the need for interviews simply disappeared. I am not looking for vacancies, they come to me on their own.
You, without noticing it, become famous in professional circles
People see how I teach, what I tell, on what examples I lay out cases, how I answer questions - and that's it, they know everything they need about me as a specialist. Webinars turn, in fact, into virtual interviews and, as a result, they are replaced.
In short, if a person came to me with a goal in life to build a super successful career, I would recommend him to combine work with teaching.
I still remember how happy we were with our very first student. The guy was not doing very easily, but he was proactive, tried, constantly asked questions, wrote in a personal. And at some point he wrote to us: “Guys, they took me to a new job with a good salary. Thank you very much!".
There was a guy who three years ago was engaged in something like digital marketing, he was indirectly related to IT, but for him all this was new. And now he studied Coober very powerfully, passed his certification and is now passing his certification on Google cloud professional architect. Now he works as a team lead in our team.
And here, perhaps, one of the most powerful arguments - why combine work and teaching. You teach yourself to colleagues
I like this practice - people begin to solve problems under your supervision, and you immediately pick up smart specialists. Our entire team is made up of people whom we ourselves have taught. I look at them and understand - hell we would find such specialists on the headhunter.
It's even cooler when the students become better than you in some issues. One of my students understands kubera better than me, another has gained a hundred times more experience with network hardware. And I ping them all the time. I ask them questions, and now they teach and pump me.
In the end, there is such a principle - you must make the world after yourself a little better than it was before you. The principle of small deeds. If you have taught a couple of people in your life the correct basic principles, then the world has already become a better place. At least two idiots less in it.
In general, if you know how to talk coolly about devops and admin affairs - write to us, we will get acquainted and move mountains - Telegram .
Well, join our community in the cart - I regularly share my experience there.