Hello Habr! Just a couple of years ago, on the pages of our favorite resource, inspiring articles of successful success flaunted, how yesterday's plumber / taxi driver / welder /
Who are you?
Let me introduce myself. I am a regular .NET developer in an ordinary government company, the main way of making money is software development. Behind his back, he graduated with honors from the % City% GTU somewhere beyond the Moscow Ring Road, service in the ranks of the Russian Armed Forces, and dreams of a bright future. I don’t have enough stars from the sky and I don’t pretend to be a new Development King (hello Phil).
Like many people, I got acquainted with programming during my school years. However, due to my age, I started with Pascal in a beautiful IDE. Then there were handicrafts of calculators of all stripes in Delphi, which were even used to solve home problems in mathematics. Then I went to university, great and mighty C ++, understanding that everything is decay and a journey into the wonderful world of C # with LINQ and asynchrony.
You may reasonably ask, what is this biography for? I will try to explain briefly. When, due to circumstances beyond my control, it was necessary to decide what profession to get, I was firmly convinced that programming was mine, so there was a minimum of hesitation. I remember sleepless nights of continuous coding that was inserted in a non-childish way. I remember books, the knowledge of which I absorbed slowly and measuredly, 30 pages a day, a hundred or two lines of code. Then moving to the northern capital, exciting first interviews, first offers and understanding of their weaknesses. It seems to me that most of the developers followed a similar path.
But what is happening now in the information technology world? On every corner there are advertisements for courses that will make you a real programmer in 21 days with guaranteed employment immediately for the% Language% Middle-Developer position. Talking about the fact that there is nothing to program, it is enough just to combine ready-made solutions, carefully compiling and sending them to a remote repository. The rantings of some media personalities, claiming that programmers are no longer needed (you know who I mean), amid talk about insane salaries in IT. And even big companies like Google are making a mess . Some time ago I laughed at this, but no longer to laugh ...
It can't go on like this
It all started with my good friend's desire to become a cool developer, let it be Alexey. Alexey is an ambitious guy aged 25+, who graduated from 11 classes and did not finish his studies at a technical school in a technical specialty that has nothing to do with IT. I, as the only familiar programmer, was attracted by a consultant on a new world for him. The main question was where to start and what to do. Of course, I began to advise reading smart books, but this method did not work. Alexei lacked the perseverance to read every word, so paragraphs and even entire chapters were read diagonally without a single attempt to translate the code from the pages into the IDE with beautiful highlighting. If a person does not see the result, he starts looking for a silver bullet. So it happened in this situation. Access to a popular online resource was paid for,proposing problems to be solved in an online compiler. But there was no growth, as it turned out there was no understanding of basic things. Alexey did not give up and stubbornly continued to hammer into the closed doors, while my fault was a misunderstanding of this aspect, and the subsequent fatal mistake - an offer to go to the place where programmers are found, in the hope of getting a job as an intern. Arriving in a big city, Alexey immediately began looking for work. But unfortunately (this was to be expected), no job offers were received. After some time, Alexey decided that something more effective was needed, and began to look for a new silver bullet. This silver bullet turned out to be one of the many online programming courses.Alexey did not give up and stubbornly continued to hammer into the closed doors, while my fault was a misunderstanding of this aspect, and the subsequent fatal mistake - an offer to go to the place where programmers are found, in the hope of getting a job as an intern. Arriving in a big city, Alexey immediately began looking for work. But unfortunately (this was to be expected), no job offers were received. After some time, Alexey decided that something more effective was needed, and began to look for a new silver bullet. This silver bullet turned out to be one of the many online programming courses.Alexey did not give up and stubbornly continued to hammer into the closed doors, while my fault was a misunderstanding of this aspect, and the subsequent fatal mistake - an offer to go to the place where programmers are found, in the hope of getting a job as an intern. Arriving in a big city, Alexey immediately began looking for work. But unfortunately (this was to be expected), there were no job offers. After some time, Alexey decided that something more effective was needed, and began to look for a new silver bullet. This silver bullet turned out to be one of the many online programming courses.But unfortunately (this was to be expected), there were no job offers. After some time, Alexey decided that something more effective was needed, and began to look for a new silver bullet. This silver bullet turned out to be one of the many online programming courses.But unfortunately (this was to be expected), no job offers were received. After some time, Alexey decided that something more effective was needed, and began to look for a new silver bullet. This silver bullet turned out to be one of the many online programming courses.
To tell you the truth, I was very skeptical about this venture. But the contract has already been signed, a group of the same Vaitishniks has been recruited, the galley rushes into a bright future. And so, what are these courses. Briefly - preparing future "specialists" for an interview, with attempts to direct a person to the right topics in the hope of giving an understanding of the deep mechanisms of language. Yes, exactly the language. In the understanding of the local public, a programmer is made a programmer by knowledge of the language and its frameworks, no more. Here it is worth making a reservation about the students of these courses. I witnessed the acquaintance of the group. As expected, people are quite diverse, of different ages (they were very middle-aged), genders and professions, 90% of whom heard about programming languages only yesterday.But all of them had one thing in common - the desire to become a Middle-developer with a salary of 100,000 rubles or more at the end of the course. Ambitious and funny enough, I thought to myself. Judging by the slight smile on the face of the owner of the courses at the other end of the monitor while voicing wishes, I'm sure he thought the same way.
As time passed, listeners were stuffed with information from online courses located on popular platforms (I wonder if the copyright was respected?), Each was given a mentor who had to teach and "strictly" examine. At the end of the courses, it was supposed to practice on a "combat" project lasting several weeks to consolidate knowledge. It's time for the release, I was wondering how it would end. And then I got my hands on a video from a private conversation of the owner of the courses, who interviewed former graduates about their current success. And then, to put it mildly, I was very surprised. For some job seekers, interviews are no big deal, they say. The maximum that can be asked in their opinion is, for example, what is a collection and what is a list. When asked about complex topics such as multithreading, the answer is that it is difficult and easier to just learn,as I understand it is about memorizing definitions. Team Lead, in their opinion, is a kind of manager who stupidly receives money and tells the team something, so why not become one right away. The spiritual leader, on the other hand, teases the candidates in IT: "You need to bargain at interviews, 150 is not money."
It should be noted that when asked to assess their knowledge, each assessed himself 7-8 points out of 10, while talking about basic things. Impostor Syndrome is not about them.
Scam or life hack?
I was wondering how people will be positioned after courses with zero experience, but eager for a position as a Middle-developer? It's simple, they were given a year of experience in the company! Yes, it's that simple. Google knows nothing about this organization, from the word at all. Not a single mention, the number of pages found is only one, leading to some random word aggregator. Well, okay, the real impostor will definitely be identified at the interview, it's not for nothing that there are so many articles from HR'ov and developers on Habré with stories about how to “correctly” interview. To our great regret, it turned out that all this is nothing more than chatter about a spherical horse in a vacuum. Sorry.
I cannot do without the high-profile names of companies whose corporate blogs, including, are present on the resource. According to the graduates of the IT specialists, they got a job there as developers. Further criticism will follow, the purpose of which is to try to force corporate executives to take a closer look at their staff and candidates.
Sberbank. Yes, this mastodon took several such specialists to his staff as developers. And not anyhow, but the real "senior engineers". This is at a time when articles appear about leaked user data and angry statements that money is disappearing from cards lying on the top shelf of the mezzanine in a book with a double bottom. I always thought about this that high-class specialists work there, whose blog I read and admired, and the money disappears only because of the illiteracy of users. Perhaps this is so, but the credit of trust has been lost.
MTS Bank. Based on the interview results, this organization offered the position of Senior Developer to another applicant. Well, the Middle-developer is, although an independent combat unit, his senior colleagues still keep an eye on him. But a Senior Developer is a person who can manage other people and make decisions. Are you out of your mind? What decisions can a person make who has no idea what a real job as a programmer is, and even teach others about life?
And a number of other companies.
How is this significant? Technology companies, for which software development is one of their profiles, or even the main way of earning money, are easily deceived by people who have memorized concepts and brazenly came to interviews to demand a soft chair and cookies in a shared basket. If this is really true, the HR department did not just show its weaknesses, it completely discredited itself by showing the complete failure of its methods of work and evaluating candidates. All this talk about the inadmissibility of the code on a piece of paper, tests for assessing skills, and other methods of assessment turned out to be exactly the same as the soft skills assessment based on the candidate's eye color and zodiac sign.
Why is that bad?
The quality of the frames. This is the main thing. The quality of the personnel determines the quality of the product, the quality of the code base, security, and productivity. This is a developer's perspective. From the business side, this is the speed of development, because for an inexperienced developer all tasks will be new, respectively, solving problems will take much more time, and not only their own. It is obvious. Climb such a "diamond" higher, and all this stream / * censorship * / of code will flow into production without code review, to the delight of users and people who will support it in the future.
What's the solution?
To understand sympathizers that the industry is not rubber, having ceased to show everyone around his viability and coolness of blue bloods.
Wake up to all those who subscribe to ads like this. I'm sure these people argue that they are out of competition. Experienced developers who have gone through fire and copper pipes. Only here is one question: why pay that kind of money to an experienced programmer, if a computer scientist will do the same, but much cheaper. And do not care that the solution will be, to put it mildly, not optimal, and not even the fact that it is safe. I am generally silent about best practice.
For those who make decisions about an offer, take a close look at work experience and real skills, education finally. The CVs of these people do not contain links to the repositories with their pet projects, because they do not exist. But they are full of the names of the most relevant tools used in development. All according to the manuals from smart HR, how to make a cool resume. Catching deception is really difficult, because they are stuffed with information on how to deceive the system with an unwavering air. At the same time, they come up with a legend about the previous place of work with hypothetical questions from the interviewer and answer options .
For those who do not reach and they continue to advertise courses for those who want to log in - ignore their activities. People chop off the branch on which they sit and inflate this bubble even more, which will burst sooner or later. The content produced by these people is most often really useful and well-made, which is leveled by the way of monetization.
Instead of a conclusion
Most likely my position on the courses, from the outside looks like open hatred and aggression. So it is after I saw it from the inside. But this applies to courses preparing Vaitishniki. For retraining courses for existing specialists - only for, although he himself did not use their services. I know some really cool IT guys who really read and studied a lot, programmed for years, and finally found their place in the sun. It only commands respect. For those who want to become a "programmer" in a couple of months only because they get paid, alas, I have a negative attitude towards such people. They discount the years the monitor burned out the eyes of engineers who learned and practiced, practiced and learned. Why did someone decide that being a programmer is easier than a steamed turnip,but at the same time it is expensive to live "bahato"? And here the conditional course will do it all supposedly in a couple of months, and the kind interviewees will confirm this.
The average university graduate (we consider only those who actually studied) goes to a salary of 40-80k in the hope of gaining at least a little work experience for further growth, realizing that it is not worth it anymore. But the impostor in all seriousness claims to be the "senior engineer". If these are the rules of the game, I don't understand them. Don't forget, this is a business that makes money from what's relevant. If tomorrow it will be topical to be a butcher, there will be appropriate courses like mushrooms after rain, and most likely with the same mentors.
Recommendation for course owners: I suggest opening a surgeon training course lasting 3 months, regardless of education. Use it. There is nothing complicated, take a scalpel in your hand and cut it, and other surgeons will show you how it should be already in the hospital, because a week of practice gives the same knowledge as a year of university, a long-known fact. But that is another story…