Programmer's apprentice

I quit school when I was 16. It just wasn't for me. Computers are what attracted me. Maybe I was wrong, but it seemed to me that at school I was only losing time, and my real education began only when I returned home. I stopped respecting this educational institution and, of course, completely quit studying. Well, they gave me a bunch of “untrained” diagnoses and started treating me. It only remained to wait for it all to end as soon as possible.

In the end, I decided that the best thing that could be done was to drop out of school and go to study at an informatics specialist — a programmer. Maybe for those who live in the USA and Canada, this sounds silly. After all, there in order to get a diploma in computer science, you must graduate from a college or university, but in Germany to leave school as a student is a common thing. We call it the “dual system of secondary vocational education.” Perhaps this system is one of the main reasons for the success of Germany.

Discipleship is closely connected with the history of the whole country. For centuries, if not millennia, carpenters and representatives of other crafts playing an important role in the region have used the vocational training system to transfer their experience. This system is based on the idea that for some professions, experience is more important than theoretical knowledge, and that it is much more useful to take the time to work on your own, listen, observe and learn from a master.

In Germany, many companies take on students — such as how companies in North America recruit interns and in-service students. If the company decides to hire you as a student, your workplace is guaranteed by the state. In the event of a bankruptcy, the company will transfer you to another company the next day. There is a whole network of companies in the country that provide mutual guarantees for jobs.
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However, unlike interns in companies in the United States and Canada, students in Germany are treated like ordinary junior staff who are simply cheaper (when I went to study, my salary was 700 marks or $ 400 a month), often younger than everyone else and approximately 60 working days per year are absent for attending classes at an educational institution. They teach the theory of each chosen profession, and after passing the final exam after completing the three-year program of study, students are issued diplomas. Students-students (who are called “pins” - “pencils”), who have successfully completed their studies and passed the exam, receive a working specialty.

I enrolled in one of the companies in my hometown - BOG Koblenz. It was a subsidiary of Siemens - a company that is known for constantly recruiting students. For some reason I remember very well one question that I was asked during the interview.

“The number of lilies in the pond doubles every day. On the first day of the month there is only one lily in the pond. On the second day - two lilies, the next day - four, then eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. If the pond is filled on the thirtieth day of the month, on which day of the month will it be half full? ”

Not to say that for me it was very difficult.

Together with me, three more such students came to work at the company. On the first day, we had a tour of the company, in which 150 people worked, then it seemed to me that it was a lot. During the first year, we carried out various assignments: 3 months working in the cafeteria, 3 months helping with accounting, 3 more months doing accounting and inventory, and 3 months working at the reception. We were told that it was a kind of initiation ceremony.

During the first three months of working in the cafeteria, I quickly became acquainted with all the employees of the company, learned what kind of coffee or tea they liked, and made sure that there was plenty of caffeine in their coffee. Those who interested me the most were working in a small room in the basement of an unattractive building. I do not remember how their posts were officially called, but in fact they worked independently, without any outside control.

Their work was different from what everyone else was doing. Most of the company's employees worked in an uncommon programming environment called Rosie SQL, which for my perception sharpened under Demo Szene was murderous (or Assembler and Pascal, or nothing!) And these guys had Delphi. I just fell in love with him! Finally, in the programming language in the foreground were not machines, but people. It was created for instant results, experimentation, and rapid prototyping. His library of window controls called VCL was much cooler than anything I've seen before. But most importantly, Jurgen was in charge of all this.

Jürgen was the name of a long-haired, gray-haired rocker of about fifty and a little, who would have looked great in some gang like Hell's Angels. Jürgen was a rebel. He refused to comply with the company's requirements for clothing and did not hesitate to argue with people in open disputes when they were wrong. And despite all this, Jurgen enjoyed universal respect. I tried my best to draw his attention to myself, even borrowed a guide to Delphi and in the intervals between delivery of coffee I learned it by heart.

At the same time, I continued to go to school on Fridays, was twice on a two-week study leave and took exams. I liked studying so much more. I felt in my place. Due to the fact that I was constantly spinning around Jurgen and his children, I learned the basics of the profession. We also learned the algorithms, “O” is large and so on, even the fundamentals of soldering and electrical installation work.

It turned out that my problems with studies are really not problems at all - I am just a practitioner. I could not understand or find a solution for those problems I had never encountered before. The school was different. I knew what I was talking about, I understood the problems that we solved. I have already been in such situations. It was cool! My self-esteem and confidence grew every day.

My plan worked.

After the first year, Jurgen took me to his place, to his little team that lived in the basement. It was probably the most important event in my professional career. Jürgen was a first-class teacher. He created conditions in which it was calm and easy to work for all 10 years. It is this method and the same conditions that I am trying to recreate with all my might here in Shopify.

Almost every day, when I came to work, I found a printout of the code that I wrote a day earlier, with red marks: either I didn't have the idioms, or I could choose better abstractions, or somehow more carefully hint at the architecture of the system as a whole. This taught me not to show ego in my codes. There is always something that can be refined and improved, so this feedback was a gift for me.

I remember how we developed software for GM. One dealer needed a faster system for estimating the value of incoming used cars - a significant competitive advantage. Jürgen gave this project to me. To deliver the project, Jurgen and I had to go to this dealer, and the trip would take a whole day. When the project was still being prepared, the company gave me money to buy a suit. In the end, we worked for Siemens, and it was necessary to look appropriate.

The day before the installation, Jurgen casually tells me that he needs to go somewhere for business, and I will go to the dealer alone. I was terribly upset, but somehow I managed to make a good impression, and it all worked as it should.

This situation was repeated constantly. Jurgen knew my “comfort zone” and created situations when I had to go a little bit beyond its limits. I overcame these difficulties through trial and error, doing my job and directly applying the theory taught in school to practice, and I did it all.

My diploma is not recognized in North America, so it is formally considered that I just dropped out of school. My co-founder at Shopify has a PhD, and we love to joke that on average we have a bachelor's degree for two.

Not degrees are important now, experience matters. This is what my apprenticeship and the dual system of secondary vocational education have taught me: the most important thing in life is gaining experience and the rapid acquisition of knowledge. If you possess these skills, you can create unbelievable situations for yourself and exit from them again and again.

Perhaps the most important thing that my training program has given me is a good advantage at the start. If I went to the university for a diploma of a candidate of science, as my co-founder, I, probably, would finish it. Instead, when I’m 32, I’ve been getting half the money to develop complex software.

This is a very serious advantage, and thanks to the dual system of secondary vocational education, virtually any student in Germany can get it. According to the latest data, the apprenticeship system is offered for 356 different professions and areas of professional activity: from hairdressers and furnace builders to various specialists in the field of computer programming. For practitioners or kinesthetics like me, an apprenticeship program is a real chance of success.

For me, these were ideal conditions. I have learned a lot and are infinitely grateful to fate for choosing this path. It is a pity that students in countries that are trying to reduce the number of young people who drop out of school and create jobs for them do not have such a choice.

Translation into Russian is made by ABBYY Language Services .