How can young professionals get a job in an IT company?

Once, colleagues from the HR department of i-Free asked me to write a short article for young professionals who are trying to get a job in an IT company. The reasons that prompted them to do this are generally understandable; in the company, the main employer of young specialists is the department under my management, we take the guys who have just graduated from the university (and sometimes the most recent students), and we have a certain “young fighter” course.
Naturally, I do not pretend to objectivity, but only want to give some advice for those who want to start their journey from work in an IT company. The article expresses a purely my opinion on how to hire a young specialist, and I very much hope that someone from senior students with this brief opus will help in their future career.
In general, those who are interested, please under the cat.


As a small preamble: who I am and what I do. My name is Ilya, and inside i-Free I perform many roles, one of which is to lead the monitoring and technical support team. And no, this is not a call center, we do not deal with this kind of customer support, our main function is to ensure the smooth operation of our services and, as a result, to provide our customers with the highest quality services. To do this, our company has its own monitoring system (based on a third-party monitoring system Zabbix), which, on the basis of tens of thousands of metrics, makes a decision about the performance / inoperability of a service. Naturally, the system itself is similar to a spherical horse in a vacuum, and then monitoring engineers come into play and monitor the system messages around the clock and solve the problems that have arisen.
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It should be aware that the monitoring engineer is only the first (or rather one of the possible) steps in an IT career. And inside i-Free there is a proven process of training and upgrading monitoring engineers to the next level. Actually, during my work, people from the monitoring team have grown to become highly qualified specialists in all IT areas, such as development, testing, administration, technical expertise and analysis. Working in a large company and being in the process of sharing professional knowledge, each of the newcomers can choose a further development path for themselves. Without going into the details of the learning process and advanced training (as this in itself draws on a separate full-fledged article, or even two), I would like to note one nuance: the monitoring group constantly needs new people, that is, recruiting practically does not stop.

Based on my many years of experience, I want to give some useful (hopefully) tips.

How to make a resume. Here the recommendation is simple: google + search query "how to create a resume" to help. There are already smart people all a thousand times painted and explained. But separately I will stop on the following subclause.

WHAT to write in the resume novice. If a person with ten years of experience has a major problem in drawing up a resume, the most important thing is to invest in the format of a document, then for a senior student, the question of what to write (and most importantly not write) in a resume stands up to its full height, since a typical senior student, technical knowledge in IT is purely university, that is, for the most part theoretical.

Here you can recommend a few points:

• Do not write what you do not know. Hearing a set of words "Java, OOP" or "mongo, fashionable, stylish, youth", do not rush to write these words in the summary. You will always be asked about them, and if you can’t show at least a basic knowledge of the subject, you will immediately spoil your opinion of yourself.
• Indicate your level of knowledge. For example, having studied C # at a university, do not hesitate to write something like: “I wrote a calculator and a small game as part of the university program”.
• If there was a part-time job in the IT sphere, even unofficial, feel free to enter the resume. For the employer, this may be interesting. We always look at it.
• By analogy: if you were at home trying to develop in the IT field outside the university framework, then feel free to write it in the resume. For example, the experience of raising linux + apache to deploy your own website is worthy of being included in the resume of a young specialist.

Finally, a summary is compiled and sent to all interesting places. Then, with a high degree of probability, the next stage will come: a telephone conversation with the recruiter of the company. It's all quite simple, if the call came in, it is most likely that your possible supervisor looked at your resume and confirmed his desire to talk with you. Therefore, a recruiter calls you with two goals: check your adequacy and make an appointment. So do not extinguish yourself and be yourself. Technical questions at this stage are unlikely to be asked. I note that the described scenario is typical, but there may be differences, for example, several telephone interviews, including technical interviews, since each company creates its own process of hiring people who are most effective for them.

Then the day of the interview has arrived, and you are going to meet with your potential leader. An important, albeit banal moment: don't be late, better come in advance. Being late, in principle, is not very polite, and the young specialist is not particularly recommended.
So, you came to the meeting, the recruiter escorted you to the negotiations, and there they were already waiting for you. And here we come close to the question: "how to behave at the interview?".

So tempting to say, "do not worry," but this is heresy. Excitement is normal. The interview is a certain kind of psychological stress, and the excitement will definitely be. But, as banal as it may sound, try to cope with your anxiety. Although, if you do not cope, then nothing terrible, on the other hand there are people who also were young specialists, and they still remember how it was. But remember that the more people you interview, the harder you will be. Some tips from personal interview practice:

• If you are worried or shy, and this bothers you, then ask your interlocutors to give you a couple of minutes to calm down. You will be given such an opportunity, maybe they will treat you to coffee and ask something abstract: the goal of the interview is to test your knowledge and potential, but not to force you into a psychological pit.
• Do not say what you do not know. Even if you can say it convincingly, do not do it.
• Do not be lazy to learn about the company before the interview. Go to their website, read the wiki, look at the articles on Habré, google it.
• Do not forget to agree on subtle points such as salary, probation, possible increases immediately at the interview. You should not postpone this for later. Important for students: be sure to discuss your study schedule at the interview! Sometimes a potential employer can forget about it.
• Before the interview, it is necessary to pump up the general IT erudition.

I will dwell on the last point in more detail. What do I put in this phrase? IT erudition is a kind of basic set of knowledge and terms that any self-respecting IT person should have. Below is a list of what is worth having an idea:

• Basic terminology: transactions, indices, etc.
• Operating Systems. Remember the existence of not only the Windows family, but also about Unix-like systems.
• File systems There is a whole bunch of file systems under each OS family, it’s worth understanding how each of them differs from the other.
• In the field of network theory: an understanding of the four-tier TCP / IP model. Knowledge of TCP and UDP transport protocols, and how they differ globally between themselves and for what purposes each of them is applicable.
• In the development field: Principles of OOP. Examples of languages ​​built on these principles. What are functional programming languages, and what are procedural programming languages. Examples are also good to remember.
• Understanding the functioning of object-relational (SQL) databases.
• But it is also worth remembering the existence of NoSQL databases. And at least theoretically know about their pros and cons.

If I forgot something, then please correct me in the comments, be sure to edit the list.

A few words about how the interview is usually held for the position of engineer of the monitoring and technical support group . The interview is carried out in three: HR recruiter, lead engineer or team leader, technical specialist. The questions are mainly asked in those areas of knowledge that are indicated in the summary, because the potential of the applicant, and not his knowledge, is primarily important for us. During the check, emphasis is placed on assessing the learnability of a young specialist. If he is a diligent student, then first of all they ask what is given in the university, if he is a self-taught practitioner, then practical questions are asked. And at the very end a logical problem is necessarily given, for the solution of which no specific knowledge is required, and the “triad” necessarily looks at how this problem is solved.
In principle, when hiring students and graduates, we primarily look at its potential, that is, how good a specialist can be in perspective, and not what he knows now. Because we can always teach, the benefit of the learning and testing processes in the i-Free monitoring group have been built for a long time
And finally, if you refused! There is nothing terrible in it; the fact that you were denied does not mean that you are bad or that you have no future in this sphere! Not on your nelly! Each company is guided by its own principles when hiring employees, and each manager operates with some of his own criteria, which may change over time. Ask recruiters to talk about mistakes at the interview, which areas of knowledge should be pulled up. This will help in future interviews. Well, there are nuances associated with the goals of the employer. For example, once we refused an excellent job seeker just because he was overqualified, because after six months of work we would not be able to provide him with the necessary level of motivation.
Good luck friends! All you get! And with questions welcome to the comments.