Java-programmer in St. Petersburg. Overview of the labor market in terms of the applicant. Part 2/3. Pitfalls for the "newbie"

Part 1/3. What are the "buns".
Part 3/3. What are the employers. Characteristics.

Pitfalls for a beginner.

The first pitfalls, in fact, may begin at the interview - for example, the project is new, the interviewing process is not yet settled, the first question may be “Do you’ve got it?” From a foreign representative, in general, to you as one of the guinea pigs, this process will be debugged. You can also suddenly be put on the “conveyor”: you can skip through the three stages of the interview for an hour or more each at once. This can cause problems if you are not prepared for the interview or if you have other interviews scheduled for this day. But it is, by the way.

General considerations.

"If someone is to blame, then who is clear in advance."

First , there is a certain natural inclination in the event of misunderstandings (what was there about managerial and communicative skills?), Friction, and, moreover, conflicts involving the newcomer, to interpret them not in his favor. Even if the newcomer is right, there are still reasons to fire him: "the manager cannot work with him," the people "do not fit into the informal corporate format" or something like that. If this “did not work out” will repeat with the next ones, then, or after a couple of candidates, someone will finally work together or ponder, or maybe “fix something in the conservatory”. In general, if you are one of the bosses or “old-timers” of those whose opinions are listened to “suddenly” with something “not liked” or for some reason you have a constant desire to pin up you or hurt or demonstrate your wits instead of clear and a clear expression of what is required of you, then if the case “reaches the handle”, it is clear who will be easier to dismiss - a novice on a probationary period who needs to be paid for three days, or a “more full-fledged” worker who needs termination of an employment contract Is it possible to pay for two or three months and with which you have somehow worked together? And if, for a couple of iterations, they still find out who they want and with whom they will work together, then they will write off the case with you to “it never happens.” Yes, and the question is whether you want to work in such an environment.
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“Vasya is conflict-free. This is an axiom. If you have a conflict with Vasya, then only you can be guilty. This is a consequence of the axiom. ”

Approximately the same smell when the boss at a new place immediately speaks about himself (and other superiors speak about him) as about a “conflict-free” person: this is just a thick hint that if you have misunderstandings and conflict, then the guilty You are pre-assigned, not “conflict-free”. Neponyatki, oddly enough (although, in general, not strange), may thus occur literally out of the blue. For example, at the very beginning of the project, the lead developer, let's call it “Peter,” describes which plug-ins for the IDE should be installed. You ask him to write off the entire IDE with already installed plug-ins (time does not wait, you, and not only you, have repeatedly read the “motivational introductory” that you need to start working faster), but for reasons of greater correctness, it gives xml instead -file with update sites of plugins, which successfully worked for him six months or a year ago. You are trying to apply this file for 24 hours, and nothing works out for you: one of the plug-ins is no longer located at the specified address and cannot be installed, and at the same time all plug-ins that are listed after it cannot be installed. When you report this “conflict-free” boss, he replies that “Peter” “cannot advise bad”, and this, probably, you have crooked hands. ( PS: self-criticism “post mortem”: stupid to use it is unclear which file is not clear where - “uncooked” (although it is partially justified by the fact that “it is necessary very quickly”). Instead, you should be able to quickly cut into obscure questions using Google and associative thinking. At least it was possible (for the same “fruitless day”, perhaps on another machine) 1) find how to install the plugins one by one, 2) isolate the “missing” plugins 3) find where they “moved” or establish that they disappeared from ends.)

But it can be the other way around - you can immediately make an impression of a particularly “promising” employee, who, on the contrary, will be given a head start in front of “not manifested” long-time employees (for example, you will be taken to the position of a leading Java programmer in a web project, even with full your lack of knowledge of the Javascript language (albeit with experience in using GWT, in which knowledge of Javascript is not necessary)).

Well, with good development of communication skills, in the event of a conflict with the manager there is even a chance to explain to the higher authorities that the manager is wrong. I wanted to write that it would not be easier to do this before the conflict, but it became clear that before the conflict there was simply no reason to appeal to the higher authorities.

Secondly , “bad luck” was noticed, that if during the trial period you were reminded that you are on a trial period, then, most likely, it will be “overwhelmed”. Podgipoteza - the reason is that its passage, in general, and was not planned, more precisely, it was planned at 30-60 percent.

Thirdly , the fact that the probationary period will be “swamped” usually becomes understandable in two or three weeks: something strangely goes awry, and the elementary things remain incomprehensible (as if they were specifically kept in the state of “incomprehensibility”). It usually takes one and a half months for such a littered probation period under a “normal” set of circumstances, and two - if there is a fixed total date for layoffs (I’ll touch on this below).

There are varieties of pitfalls.

• The manual does not understand what it technically wants.

  Occurs, in theory, rarely, but the author personally hit this once. It was a “lingering start-up”, the financing of which continued on the good will of its financial director, who was parallel to one of the top managers at one real estate agency, for this agency this company served at the same time and instead of the IT department. The company wanted to write an ICC, they wanted to have a GUI module for it, which could work both as a web client and as a “heavy” application on Swing (the concepts “Rich client” did not know then neither I nor them, it was the beginning 2005). In the end, the author chose a cropped modified version of SwiXML as the universal intermediate layer. Employers could not clearly articulate what they need as a base - web or swing version. The author was there at least second in this area, after he decided to transfer the case to a certain outsourcer from Moscow.
  
  As a kind of self-criticism of “post mortem”, it can be said that if the author were more experienced, he could have been able to quickly find and “promote” / “push” / “sniff” / “impose” / “introduce” a solution but there is a counter-suspicion that, being so clever, the author would hardly have been flattered by that vacancy ;-). In other matters, after the dismissal of the month from which the job search took the last week (the remaining three weeks are temporary part-time work), the author found another job, where both the salary and the clarity of the tasks were greater.
  
  

• "You need a man for five minutes to fire him."

  The wording is somewhat exaggerated, but at least a couple of varieties of this phenomenon exist: 1) you need to temporarily take someone's place, then transfer the necessary person to it, or 2) more people take it in advance than they plan to leave. The first may be, for example, when a large-scale project closure takes place at an outsourcing company due to a shrinking market, and suddenly one projector was launched: it turned out to “unwind” —to find a customer. In this case, the project takes one “extra”, and even, at the insistence of the interviewed manager, a person who almost falls short of the vacancy level, and then in every possible way hide from him “eerie professional secrets” such as automatic formatting with IDE tools, semi-automatic refactoring and other “combing the code” by them - to give a person to build up a negative in a personal matter. The second reason can be combined with the first and even mask it.
  
  Such “aggressive personnel selection” can be practiced on an ongoing basis - in particular, in some IT companies serving online sweepstakes: they need people with specific skills that, it seems, the local bosses can not work out, and perhaps only select those who already have them. In such companies, the dismissal is also delivered to the conveyor, there are fixed dates of mass layoffs and a cunning policy of making job offers: it is necessary that between the job offer and the date of mass layoffs there is less (at least a week) maximum probationary period - three months . If they even decided to “put up a cross” on an employee even after just three weeks, they simply cease to be given tasks and can be kept in such a strange “hanging” state for almost two months remaining until the date of mass layoffs, without actually taking out all that time for a long time decision to dismiss.
  
  “Bonus” to such a “personnel pipeline” is a little “unfair” and generally pofigist attitude towards newcomers: if you still half dismiss, then “if we offended someone for nothing”, then this is a trifle against the general background. “So you are not lucky. So you are a loser. Get out! Losers do not need "Corporation"! ". If, in the middle of the process of completing a task that has been set aside for the week, you are suddenly forced to migrate from the brake computer you were given first to a new one, otherwise it will be given to the next department, while at the same time you need to copy ~ 100 GiB workspaces during migration, and at the same time mastering work on it in Windows 7 after XP on it - this is just such a case.
  
  

• "Russian SCRUM, senseless and merciless."

  The author met in the fall of 2009 in one company from the “top 10” software firms in St. Petersburg (although a couple of months later, in that company, massive staff cuts started - correct: “by agreement of the parties” and with salary payments for two months as a holiday benefits). They follow not so much the “spirit” of the SCRUM-technique, but its “letter”, and not everywhere, but arbitrarily, mostly when it is situationally the most contrary to the spirit and negatively influences the result. The team is recruited by 60-70% of people who, according to the SCRUM method, had not worked before and in general from beginners. The disadvantages of “flexible” and “waterfall” technologies are successfully combined: the first take a low-profile attitude to planning - not very little time is given to it: an hour for a three-week sprint with dividing tasks into subtasks not longer than five, but preferably two or three hours (total about 10 seconds on average for planning a single task), from the second - the inability to deviate from hastily planned and correct planning errors during the sprint. It serves as a source of “jambs” that can be easily transferred to “who needs it” (with a record in a personal file), thanks to which it is well combined with the practice of “taking people with a reserve” from the previous paragraph.
  
  

• "Recurrent" trial period.

  At the end of the probationary period (yes, a full three months), you are told that you are not suitable for them, but you can quit on your own will and immediately write a letter of employment - they will take you. And so constantly.
  
  

• Undervalued and "muddy" tasks.

  It would be more accurate to call this underwater stone “hidden investigation abyss”. When both the amount of work and the time required to perform them must be the result of a separate, not previously anticipated, research that still needs to be done, and the result may have a variation of 10 times, well, or differ every 10 times from the value set at initial assessment. Here there is a purely “floating joint” (unknown to the beginner at the beginning). The above mentioned item about “misunderstandings and conflicts” can work: when an employee with a well-established reputation runs into such a task, he is more likely to believe that the task was previously incorrectly evaluated than the beginner.
  
  Yes, and such tasks tend to fall exactly on beginners. “Old-timers” often have the right, not quite formal, but in fact, not to “choose their tasks to taste”, but to “set priorities for themselves” (based on their experience), what to do in the first place, and what in the second, and to assign tasks in the queue and by priorities which task, based on which of them, in his opinion, is more necessary and more important for the project as a whole and, in dealing with which of them, he will be able to bring more benefits to the project faster. The queue may not reach the third or fourth queue, including due to the fact that the included “over-task” can be rescheduled with the choice of another way to solve it, and then the original task is a surprise! - will disappear. Yes, the “old-timers”, trying in every way to “push away” such “muddy” tasks from themselves, are often right: the case has a chance to get around the workaround. The newcomer has an increased risk of “getting” to such “mines” also because the authorities can cherish the backward thought that a fresh person will come with a fresh look and from this new point of view, the solution of the problem can be seen easier and faster.
  
  Especially “fun” if you have several tasks each week in your test plan, and the first one that you take is from the “hidden investigation abyss” series: you could do this task by three and a quarter tasks of the four, and so make of the same four - zero and a half tasks. In order to "get out" and succeed to the maximum, in such a situation managerial skills are needed (which was not expected at first): pre-assess tasks for an abundance of pitfalls (for this you need to have the skills to split tasks, component-wise risk assessment and other planning), “punch” yourself as the first in turn, those tasks that are less “muddy”, reasonably “jump off” from the task or seek its re-planning, if during its solution it suddenly became clear that its “turbidity”, “transfer the arrows” to subcontractors (such as s tasks) and pedal thesis that it is they con you by (provoke) failure of the timing of work for which you are placed to respond. If for some reason you have a personal “point” for “conflict-free” (as mentioned above), then it will tie your hands to a large extent.
  
  On the other hand, “muddy” tasks are a chance ;-). A chance to learn new technologies and techniques (such as launching ELF files from under Tomcat in an MSWS on a virtual machine - you need to remember to kill the child process after 5 seconds, which is unclear how to do except from a specially launched parallel stream), practice in (over) ) engineering the type of writing frameworks on annotations. Especially if this does not result in dismissal due to failure to complete the probationary period ;-)
  
  Also, “pushing muddy tasks to newbies” quite falls into the mainstream of the policy of the “personnel pipeline” - “at the same time”, since half the time it’s still to be dismissed. But on the other hand, it can be considered as a peculiar variant of “baptism of fire”.
  
  Not particularly large, but fatally significant for some, the number of "muddy" tasks also appears in the case of "senseless and merciless SCRUM" 'and from the previous paragraph. These are not only tasks from the “hidden investigation abyss” series, but also those that are too dependent on other tasks (you cannot proceed once others have been solved), which is imperceptible at first or may not be intentionally accentuated. Here it is necessary to show considerable quickness at that brief stage when the performers examine their tasks so that you do not have a similar one — the last — the problem area. Here, too, one must have some experience, which at first is usually not. Although, I suspect, this exotic remained in 2009 and earlier.
  
  The item “The management doesn’t understand well what it technically wants” can also be considered a hypertrophied version of this item - to the extent of “we are looking for a middle developer to perform the tasks of a leading architect”. But in general, the main thing here is not to be flattered by such vacancies and to be able to explain to people in a reasoned and intelligible way what they “want for a penny penny” - they can understand.
  
  

• The overall "rottenness" of a particular narrow area of ​​work.

  It is worth highlighting to a point separate from the previous one ... Works are different. If the organization is large and makes one big product with variations, then there is a great chance that there will be areas of work with significantly different “interestingness” of tasks and prospects for professional growth. Not that it was a caveat just for a newbie, but ... Someone writes the kernel, and someone with the same beautiful Java Developer label is doing an urgent search for “why the customer in trial operation stopped this crap yes, damn, it is also incorrectly written and never worked normally - the default mechanism saved, yes, the last changes were made six months ago, why did they write about this error only yesterday ?? ”and have been actually programming for a total of three months in two years, from which two months - during probation, and, so, in fact, and not really having studied beyond the general level of the system that the company does. And - a surprise! It is not at all a surprise - that it is in such areas that the staff turnover is high, after six months people leave of their own accord (yes, yes, by 146% of their own), and a newcomer, according to the theory of probability, is hit in such a sector. It is generally useless for the authorities to talk about this, the presence of such sites is an objective consequence of the ways of organizing work, in any case someone has to do this work, “organizing social justice” is not the company's goal, the company is stupidly easier to put up with add. costs due to staff turnover in such areas. There may be few sites, but it is they who make the main contribution to the overall staff turnover at the firm, and they are the same significant supplier of vacancies.
  
  

• The total “exoticism” of a beginner.

  Rarely, but ... If you are "unformatted" by some criterion, for example, age — you are over 35, that is one more reason for bias: the stereotype “in 30 years it’s time to be a manager, not a coder,” and even more so looking for a job other than by personal connections ”has not yet disappeared, for some you turn into an exotic“ loser ”who is“ not sorry ”. Here you have to be ready more than usual to “explain yourself”, “rip the template”, “create your image” and show other facets of communicative balancing act. On the other hand, is it worth it, since from the very beginning such misunderstandings have gone?
  
  

• Smaller neponyatki.

  Of the smaller, less dangerous misunderstandings, I would like to point out a situation where, in his opinion, the head knows exactly how to perform the task given to him, and you have more experience in doing this concrete work like this and know how to do it faster, but the bosses cannot assess your method. For example, you need to internationalize the Russian web interface to JSP (~ 150 files) - put the pieces of text into resource files and replace them with links, the authorities do not know about the existence of Word macros and insists that you have to do everything in your notebook. Here, the options may be different - for example, to do as the bosses say, or to make as you see fit yourself, or to do as you see fit yourself, but until the heads see, or to “defend” your approach before the heads.
  
  

If, however, did not work out.

When a firm hires five people in a row at the same place, and no one is held up as a result, it doesn’t look so bad (at least not so noticeably) as if a person changes five places of work and doesn’t work on one of them not held. If you (or “you”, but you turned out to be “extreme”, of course, anyway) “threw up” a probationary period, then you need to think how to reflect this in the following interviews. You can reflect this work episode in the resume, you can not mention it (especially if there is no employment record), you can mention it orally, at the second or third stage of the interview, you can start mentioning it in the resume, but not immediately, but after a couple of jobs ( they still need to get!). If you don’t mention, you need to somehow explain why you allegedly didn’t work at that time (yeah, people quit on May 22 on Tuesday — not since Monday or the end of the month — of their own accord, having worked for a year with a tail, and something suddenly from September 8, looking for work). If at the same time, “according to the law of meanness”, the reason for leaving a previous job was low, in your opinion, the salary (yeah, the oil painting: “went from a low salary to nowhere”), then you will have to look for another explanation, in general, decide that you better: the reputation of an employee who “failed” a probationary period or the reputation of an employee who is suddenly prone to “quit” job. If the work is reflected in the workbook or you decide to mention it for another reason, then you need to think about how to explain the reasons for leaving. If, for example, you were asked to write “on your own” because of the bad quality of your code and because you were superfluous in the team (more precisely, the team had someone else planned in advance and this “extreme” turned out to be you, maybe - due to the fact that the quality of the work process, including the quality of the code, is intentionally “launched” wherever possible, and you will say at the next job interview that you left because of a conflict in the team, then most you yourself right from the interview stage will glue the label of “conflict” that you can t the passage of the probationary period is already there ;-). Well, no one promised that little tricks will be completely free and never go sideways ;-). Then, after a couple of years / places of work, by “pulling up” the quality of the code, you can call (verbally) and the “real” reason.

And one more positive, and for IT and Java is especially important, the moment of unsuccessful trial period - there remains knowledge about technologies, techniques, platforms and libraries, which are difficult to get by other means.

Something like a conclusion.

Above already flashed a phrase about "baptism of fire." This is so - in case of successful completion of the trial period, then it will be easier (at least, there will be no positive reputation). In general, for a successful “baptism of fire” and overcoming the stress associated with embedding into a new structure, it is desirable to satisfy the requirements of a vacancy “by 146%”, to be “head and shoulders above” the work required . After all, the required performance will have to be given out taking into account unexpected risks, misunderstandings, bias and other possible interfering and demotivating factors. To do this, you must at least slightly be a manager: planning and risks are already managerial competencies.

Another couple of tips. It would be nice if all the “fraught” orders, instructions, explanations and your answers to them are recorded , otherwise the team leader will verbally ask you to commit the unverified code, and then the project manager will say that the team manager could not say that. And remember that you are in charge of a personal business, where all your mistakes are recorded - although it is somewhat biased, but frankly verifiable lies or overly evaluative judgments, which are out of business style due to their degree of appraisal, will not be written into it. You, however, will not be allowed to read it either, although it would be useful to know which direction of work on yourself would be the most optimal.

You must also be internally prepared for the fact that the probationary period may be “failed”, including through no fault of yours. In consolation one can say what is usually, i.e. in more than 50% of cases, this trouble still does not happen ;-)

Part 1/3. What are the "buns".
Part 3/3. What are the employers. Characteristics..