School programmers HeadHunter - open set 2015/16

September - the beginning of the school year, not only in schools and universities. HeadHunter once again (for the sixth time!) Announces admission to the School of Programmers . This year, as in the previous year, we will prepare a full-stack of developers ready for all the challenges of modern web development.

Training will be held twice a week in the evening at the HeadHunter Moscow office next to the Alekseevskaya metro station. To enter the school, you must fill out a form on the site and pass a small test. For candidates who have passed this stage, we will send additional tasks, by the results of which we will invite you for an interview.

School - 2014

Multi-stage selection helps us to accept only the most deserving candidates to the School, who will be interested in studying and working together. For example, last year applications were filed by about one thousand three hundred people, we sent them all introductory tasks. 350 applicants sent us their decisions. Of these, we selected 65 of the best works and invited authors for interviews. Following the interviews turned out a group of students from 14 people. It’s a pity, of course, that not everyone got to the end of the training, but those five who completed the work and presented the team project received job-offers from us.

Our teachers (all - HeadHunter employees) gave about 40 lectures, and the final project curator was Boris blv Wolfson, who was then the company's technical director (now he is the development director).
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Lev Ekasov, a graduate of the school, and now the developer of hh.ru:

- While working on the project, I fully felt the value of the knowledge gained in lectures. The team project gave me the opportunity to apply this knowledge and gain experience in team development of a product from scratch. Boris Volfson, as a project manager, introduced flexible methodologies to our work, we experienced many agile practices in life: there were reviews with 150+ comments from fellow schoolchildren and HeadHunter developers, and night stand-ups (since everyone went to university or already worked) and Sunday retrospets, and a responsible demo in front of HeadHunter employees and executives. HeadHunter employees actively helped us with tips and code review. By the end of the work on the project, I already felt that we had become a beginner, but already a team, and not a development team. The result was a working product, quite suitable for the role of a prototype in a new field for the company. In fact, the project turned out to be a mini-demonstration of the internal structure of the company HeadHunter as a whole, going to work I knew many employees and approaches to development.

What will happen this year?

The first stage of education (from November 2015 to February 2016) will consist mainly of lecture material and homework. Our teachers - HeadHunter developers - will talk about modern web-technologies and their practical use, architecture and operation of high-load services. Training traditionally begins with back-end lectures and ends with front-end technologies and design lectures. We record some lectures on video, but so far exclusively for the internal use and convenience of the students themselves. Special attention is given to the course of lectures on flexible methodologies, product development and engineering practices from the blv itself. A more detailed program of lectures can be viewed on the school website .

In addition to attending lectures, prospective students should devote about 10-15 hours a week in advance to independent study and homework. This should be taken seriously and in advance to plan your free time - in the process of learning we monitor attendance and homework. As practice shows, about half of the students leave the School prematurely because of academic performance problems.

The second stage of training is work on a team project. Students will be able to apply their knowledge in real life and to join the engineering practices used in industrial programming. Every year, the guys choose the actual topic and develop a project from the idea to the current prototype, which is presented to the management of HeadHunter and their future colleagues. During the work on the project, students closely get acquainted with flexible methodologies, get experience of interaction with the customer, designers and colleagues on the team, in one word - learn to create a product. During this stage we pay a small stipend of 10 thousand rubles.

Why do you need a school?

It is no secret that good developers do not grow in the garden. But for us, the School has become a kind of "garden" - a forge of young and promising personnel. In the five years of the school’s existence, 19 of its graduates have become full members of the HeadHunter team, 15 of them still work with us, and three graduates of the school have become team leaders.

Alexander Inozemtsev, who graduated from school 2013–2014, is now leading the team responsible for developing the mobile version of the site ( m.hh.ru ):

- Almost four years ago I read about the HeadHunter School of Programmers on Habré the day after the end of the application process. Then I was very surprised that companies with a seemingly ordinary small site needed to train themselves future employees.

A year later, I learned about this event in advance and sent a request. I graduated from the institute with knowledge of mathematics and Computer Science. Among the languages ​​in which tasks were accepted were Java and Python. My arsenal was limited to C at the level of university laboratories and PHP + Javascript for its web-crafts. I had to sit with a book and prepare tasks for python. After successfully completing the first stage, they sent me the next batch of tasks. After that there was an in-person interview and after a while I was happy to find out that I had passed.

A month later, jobs began on Java, development methods and project architecture. We were united in groups and we called up the evenings and did our first project - a Java chat with the requirements for maximum load. After that, we defended our chat on the presentation before the technical department of Headhunter (it seems we managed it =)).

After the new year, another project began, where the customer and the curator were the HeadHunter technical department employee. At this stage, we were not limited in the choice of technologies and product solutions - they just needed to be protected in front of the curator. In May, we completed our training and project final presentation. In addition to projects from October to April, we were told about Unix, Git, Java, Python, Javascript, layout, development methodologies, testing, operation and much more. At that time, it began to clarify what HeadHunter is doing and why so many specialists are working on it (after all, it ranks 3rd in the world in the SimilarWeb ranking among job sites).

After graduation, there was an interview and a job offer in the company. In June 2013 I went to work as a junior developer in one of the teams of the technical department. Began to dive into the world of development, work on many interesting projects, meetings, challenges, debates, conferences, bugs, new technologies, reports of colleagues ...

School and work at hh.ru gave me practical skills in developing large and complex projects - something that was not taught at the institute.

Now, as a lead developer, I am developing the mobile version of HeadHunter - m.hh.ru.

What you need for admission?

When enrolling in the School, we do not pay attention to work experience or level of education. The only condition for admission is the successful completion of the selection stages. In principle, the Computer Science course is sufficient for this.

For solving problems and in-person interview, knowledge of algorithms and data structures, ability to find optimal solutions and evaluate their complexity will be useful. Good knowledge of one of the programming languages ​​(we prefer Java and Python) will not be out of place. Programming skills will have to be demonstrated when filling out a questionnaire to do a little testing.

And of course, the mandatory requirement for the future student of the School is the motivation, the desire to learn and grow. If this is about you, we can assume that half the work has already been done =)

Good luck and see you in class!