Hunting for Java-developers: how to grow professionally and become a desired goal

Two in this photo a month later they changed their job to a steeper one.

A student who only teaches Java can get more in Moscow than the current developer. For example, in the Russian development center of Deutsche Bank, the scholarship fluctuates around 100 thousand rubles. in a month - and they still only teach you for this money, work - later.

The demand for developers each year grows by about 10-15 percent, and the base for education does not cope. And the needs are growing, and the turnover is big: after all, at some point, it turned out that Java allows us to develop code in the most industrialized way.
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So, now I will tell you what career options you have in Russia and abroad, if you already know Java, or at least have a couple of months to switch to a new language and a new development environment. Abroad, by the way, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are actively hiring Java engineers specializing in backends. And we have Odnoklassniki, Deutsche Bank, Oracle, Luxoft, Sberbank-Technologies, Azul and others. Come on, show you what and how.

Examples

Amazon is a huge international company, and at the same time very flexible. If you remember, at first they were selling books, then they almost bent on the dot-com bubble, but they survived by trading in any kind of shnyaga. Then they began to sell everything to everyone, and abruptly went to IT, launching the first decent cloud. They have one of the coolest data centers, good infrastructure, their own CDN, robots in warehouses - and you can imagine everything anyway. The most important thing is that their corporate standard is Java, and there are a lot of them in the backend. There is no particular specialization, but working with big data and optimization experience can be a good plus for an interview.

Oracle , in general, is doing a lot of things, the only company in the world that has the entire stack: its hardware, its own operating systems, its middleware and its final software. At the same time, what is interesting, we have a large development center in St. Petersburg that specializes mainly in Java: out of 350 employees, about 200 are just Java developers. In particular, JDK, JVM, Java Embedded and Internet-of-Things. This is the second Java competency center in the world. Larger only the central campus in California (Santa Clara). They are looking for people who are interested in developing those only in Java, but also in making the Java technology itself, since they, in fact, determine the future of the language and development environment.

Azul is a manufacturer of high-performance Java machines. A small company, less than 100 people. And it is especially cool that in St. Petersburg there is a development office in which Zing and Zulu are working. Looking for cool JVM specialists in their office in St. Petersburg.

Classmates - 95% of their software is written in Java. There are now less than a hundred developers, only three offices (St. Petersburg, Moscow, Riga) employ about 300 people. That is, a very small company compared to Facebook or Twitter, but at the same time doing one of the most heavily loaded projects in the world. Actively contribute to OpenSource, above all, to Cassandra and JDK. They use a bunch of performance optimizations, and sometimes the OpenJDK, Cassandra and Lucene / Solr patches themselves, and put such patched versions in production, because there is no time to wait for the patches to flow into the main branch. Actively looking for specialists in their offices in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Core Java, BigData, Highload. No Java EE. If you are in another city and smoke a good topic, they will organize a move with all the details.

Deutsche Bank is the largest subdivision of the world's largest banking conglomerate. Tasks are related both to huge amounts of data for online transactions (quotes), and for analytical processing (terabytes of data for financial instruments). Actively looking for specialists from their development centers in St. Petersburg and Moscow. They take from regions, relocate. There is a very good training program.

It is worth noting among the banks Sberbank-Technologies - a structural unit of Sberbank, largely due to which Sberkassa has become decent and technological. They love to make products with a human face, in fact - they arrange a kind of IT-revival of a large company, as at one time was at IBM. Actively looking for Java-specialists in their offices in St. Petersburg, Moscow and Minsk.

Luxoft is the largest outsourcer. Actively looking for specialists in their offices in St. Petersburg, Moscow and many other cities. Relocate from other cities. Many different projects, mainly Enterprise Java (Java EE, Hibernate, Spring).

Of the big players, Twitter is also worth noting - they have their own storage system, a lot of Scala, a lot of Big Data, a lot of logging on optimizations and a hardcore backend. Actively contribute to OpenJDK. LinkedIn is actively running high-level Java developers, but I can't say exactly what specificity. And of course, Facebook . Despite all the statements, PHP is there only on the front-end, and on the backends - a lot of Java, and judging by their frenzied headhunting activity, a lot of architectural problems;)

And from those whom almost all Javists know - there are JetBrains with offices in St. Petersburg, Prague and Munich. These stand right at the root of all tuling and do it themselves to determine how work with a live IDE will look like. Of the foreign ones, there is Eclipse, but they are, in fact, a strange lotion to IBM, so along with all the charms of technology, you will get all the “charms” of working in a company of half a million people.

Stop, do not rush to submit a resume!

The first idea, of course, is to knock on these wonderful people and offer yourself a job. If you are sure that you know their technology stack and have relevant experience - yes, that would be a good idea. If not, you will first need to tighten up some training.

And here you will find an unpleasant surprise.

The fact is that there is no Java training like this in Russia. Yes, there are several universities like MEPI or MSU that have long since switched to modern development tools in their courses. But they release, in fact, novices without experience. There was almost no centralized transition to Java anywhere, and this is natural. They teach programming as best they can. In general, there are strong specialized departments in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan, Novosibirsk.

What to do then?

The traditional way, of course, opensource - this is experience in a team, and a good portfolio, and a beautiful code that can be shown. The second option is different hackathons that give a quick assessment of knowledge and show where to look. The third option, my most favorite - is to listen to experts who solve specific problems in specific companies and absorb knowledge.

That is why I restored from the ashes of JUG.ru (Russian Java User Group). And that is why a couple of years ago I decided to do a conference on Java instead of the past Java Day and JavaOne Russia. But not just a conference, but such that the speakers were only hardcore, so that the backend prevailed among those, so that everyone would be practitioners directly related to the development of large projects. And so no "how to do your business on the Internet."

The first time was not bad, the second one was good, the third one was very cool. In short, we will soon have another such conference in St. Petersburg: for example, there will be 6 reports from Oracle, 2 hardcore JVM-engineers from Azul, three reports on the crazy Highload from the reckless Odnoklassniki team, some Luxk Enterprise-hardcore, reports from the Deutsche Bank engineers , JetBrains, Red Hat, SAP and others.

What does a normal level look like?

See what top freelancers write in their profiles and pay attention to the focus on specific technologies. If you do not have words from three letters in your resume, most likely you will not find a really sweet job - everyone now needs a narrow specific experience.

So, first, the emphasis on practice:

I have more than 2 years of experience and Java developer and 2 years of experience. Also I was involved in high performance computing programming. Completed for use with MPI technology. I’m very motivated. I am a Gentoo Linux contributor. As a result, I have skills in python and shell scrip ...

Second, focus on a specific area:

Seasoned developer with various development technologies (C ++ / Java / C # / Scala / Python etc.). Have been doing algo trading / electronic trading. Have acquired considerable business knowledge in finance (equities, futures, FIX etc). Have experience with both server side and client side (Java, C # / WPF, QT) and web development. I speak English, Russian and Hebrew fluently. I know basic Spanish as well, which ...

There are also examples of portfolios without specialization: people can afford to write this, knowing that they have a high rating. Plus, at outsourcing, a lot of tasks are solved by the “general plan”:
Third:

Leadership: (from 3 to 6 person) leadership and technical account management.
Problem-solving and evaluates results.
For creative thinking, for creative thinking. 6+ years of experience.

Do not think that something like a ride in real life when you look for a place to work. Again, the general things are good in freelancing, but really high wages and good projects start when you enter the top hundred in the country for a particular technology. And you can effectively learn only in practice. To get such a practice, you need to understand what tasks are solved by someone and immediately target the most interesting ones.

Career

If you now live in the region and receive about 50-70 thousand rubles, then the first thing to do is to understand where you should develop. Learning Java "in isolation" from a specific goal does not make sense. First you need to scoop up the experience: participate in a conference or connect online, ask friends from the development, chat on forums, read the blogs of experts in the field. The first task appears - to get a job in Moscow or St. Petersburg in a particular company.

Here the main question is why to Moscow or Petersburg. The fact is that in the region you get, say, 70 thousand rubles. In Moscow for this you will receive 150, in Petersburg 120. At the same time, minus an apartment and more expensive food - but you are still in the black. It is very easy to start abroad from our St. Petersburg, so the second priority after Java is good English. Or German, for example.

My suggestion

I understand that you no longer have time to fit into a conference in Petersburg, and, in general, you may not need it very well, understandably. Yes, and we have already collected a quorum, to be honest. Therefore, we sell e-tickets for online broadcasting (and the last two times they even went very well, only when one of the video channels fell for 10 minutes, I was overwhelmed with letters as with a good land attack).

With this ticket you can see all the reports online. Yes, the price tag is not the lowest, but believe me, I know what I sell and it's worth it.

The most important thing: I don’t like it - I’ll return the money by the first letter without question, even if you’ve already seen everything.

Here is our conference: right on the main there is a list of reports with theses .
Here you can buy access - http://jugru.timepad.ru/event/136541/ .
Here is a report from the past .
Here is the open video of a year ago .

I believe that we are doing a cool job, and I know how much positive was at previous conferences.

And this time we will try to make it even cooler.