What can a student expect in IT, and what options are there at all

In St. Petersburg, Java-junior salaries range from 30 to 60K rubles. For a couple of years, really grow to 80K, in 3-4 years - to 120K. These are pre-crisis prices, now many have raised wages by another 20 percent, first those with foreign clients, and then the rest, in order to remain competitive.

The problem, of course, is how to immediately choose the right place where you can grow as fast as possible. Even knowing in general the basic technology (Java), further opens such a huge number of branches from game design to hardcore highload, which quickly becomes clear - you have to choose. Here and now, because to study everything in detail will not work: the world is constantly changing, and you can only be in one thing at a time.
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I have been observing the behavior of IT students with great interest for several years now. It turns out that after university they either have the necessary good practice as a start; or they face a damn strange choice, where it’s not even clear what to choose from. And from books, Githubs or other independent ways to learn fast enough will not work out - a lot of time will be spent just in vain. At the same time, everything is needed in the world: there is a wild personnel hunger for Java programmers around the world. The number of programmers in the world is growing by 15% per year, that is, it doubles every 5 years , and in Russia even faster. The business has a huge demand for progers. It is clear that universities simply do not have time to prepare such a number of personnel.

We need to do something about it. And here are some conclusions we made in the Java User Group regarding students.

How to help a student?

Obviously, the first thing to do is to give a maximum of practical knowledge and work. It is better to have the position of Junior-developer somewhere and the opportunity to live with a girl, than to try freelancing (although there are some successful examples, of course).

The problem, I repeat, is that students are not ready for practical work. Therefore, if in the third year I managed to choose the right internship, go through it well and gain knowledge - yes, this is the right way to the company where I had an internship. If not, then before us, believe me, a completely unclaimed specialist. Often - with high expectations due to viewing heaps of graphs and reading HH statistics on IT-vacancies.

Deutsche Bank and T-Systems, for example, have their own Java schools. They study there both for free and with the payment of scholarships (approximately equal to the salary of the Junior developer), and the best are offered to go to work in the company.

On the other hand, students actually do not differ much from middle-developers in this choice of life path (if you think about it). The middle-developer happens to have a “midlife crisis” at some point, when he realizes that he doesn’t understand something. Like, and writes well, and matured, and his commits do not enrage anyone in the team, and in general ... But something is missing.

At “big” conferences like Joker, they get such a charge of simple life practice that it often becomes immediately clear what can be done and what is missing in life. And immediately before the eyes there is a goal. Not abstract, but very specific. Achievable.

Therefore, we decided to do something similar for the students.

We select practitioners

The task is to make it so that a conference participant could not only see what is happening in the world at all, but also somehow apply his knowledge.

Therefore, we find those who solve real practical problems and at the same time take students to the team. That is, he understands exactly how to whom and where to grow - and he himself has already raised at least a generation of combat developers.

From here the conference program is formed. Here it is in finished form. Here there are different stacks of technology, and just practical stories about working life of different types of developers, and a little story about the proper organization of work (the so-called "student syndrome", with which every team leader who worked with trainees is familiar), and downloads, and specific stories from specific people who succeed - how and what they did.

Each of the speakers for the participant - a source of knowledge in the smoking room. And each of them can take a particularly distinguished friend to practice.

For example, almost immediately there were quite big comrades who constantly need hardcore developers. The first were Odnoklassniki - they have high loads, 7000 servers, all Java servers, front-end web and Mobile, fault tolerant distributed systems, in the Top-100 on the global Internet traffic, in the Top-10 in the world according to the total time that users spend Online.

Then EPAM came - the largest outsourcer (or, as it is now fashionable to say, "service company"), more than 10,000 employees. Among the clients are the world's largest banks, automakers, telecom operators, airlines, and others. In total, there are more than 2,000 completed projects around the world.

Naturally, Deutsche Bank , or rather its Russian technology center, joined. They make high-performance and highly reliable technological solutions for trading financial instruments around the world. There are offices in St. Petersburg and Moscow, in total in Russia more than 1000 people. Our programmers solve important tasks for DeutscheBank around the world.

And they all have something to offer to a novice programmer - internships, vacancies for juniors, Java schools, etc.

What happens to a student

As a rule, not everyone reaches the finish line, but it’s possible to put something in the portfolio. For example, in Odnoklassniki, the last “call” was this - for the year students made 10 projects, of which 3 came to production and were integrated into the portal.

The coolest, in my opinion, project is a porn detector based on searching for skin on the photo. The story is this: more than 15 million photos and videos are loaded on the portal every day. Among them are those who violate the rules of the site and the laws of the Russian Federation. The moderator can process 1 photo in 1 second and can work 8 hours a day without a break. Accordingly, it would take at least 500 moderators to watch this content. At the same time, there is not much pornofoto in the general stream and, if somehow sort the stream of photos according to the degree of suspicion, then you would have to look through much less materials.

In this regard, a student research project was launched, the purpose of which was to develop an algorithm for determining the degree of "pornography" of photographs. The engineer, together with the student, tried various algorithms on the test labeled samples. Yes, they had to manually look at a lot of photos from the open part of the portal and mark porn (the guys say that for the first couple of hours it was even fascinating). Then they chose the algorithm that showed the best result and worked for a reasonable time. As a result, 15 million images are processed per day. After extensive testing, the code was laid out in production, where it has been successfully operating for more than six months. It is clear that there are a lot of false positives - but it still turned out very, very useful.

Sudden problem - price

Oddly enough, but it was from the ticket price that we began to dance. Let me remind you that our conferences are distinguished by the following things:

• Only hardcore, only code - no startups, ajaylov and other snot;
• 100% self-sufficiency: you pay for tickets - we make a conference;
• Very careful selection of speakers and a lot of feedback: we listen to everyone, we evaluate, we prepare. And even then, it is worth someone to let us down (to prepare poorly, to carry nonsense, to do advertising instead of business), as you will not see it anymore.

All this means that a ticket costs several thousand rubles (for a large Joker from 9 to 30) . This is not cheap, but the constant growth of the conference shows that the benefits still come much more than the money was spent.

But to explain to the student that we want such money from him, we are not yet ready. Therefore, the ticket should cost a penny - to cut off freeloaders and completely left-wing people.

We keep within the budget

Task : 900 rubles (as a result) the student pays to come to the conference, listen to what happens in the real world and find a job in the end. Or at least just figure out what to do exactly next.

This year, Joker and I grew so well that we had to rent a whole piece of the hotel with all the halls there. Such a mass rent has a peculiarity - it is not much more expensive to remove them for 3 days than by 2. In this case, there were some shoals from past conferences behind the hotel, so we managed to take the rooms for student days for nothing.

The same story with the rental of sound and projectors, video and other services. The same story with the printing of different printing - circulations grow twice, the price - no. Therefore, suddenly, by placing a student conference right after the “big” one, we were able to meet the budget.

What is the result

In general, Joker turned out for students - university.jokerconf.com . Petersburg, October 18 - this Sunday already!

Affordable, hardcore, damn useful (if you are a student or novice developer). As a side effect, we have already received a whole stream of people who want to look at this miracle of nature - yet the main Joker is familiar to almost every javist in this part of the world, and many want to learn from our experience. We welcome such guests. And, of course, we will be damn grateful if you look in on your own or tell familiar students about us.



Naturally, we will post the best materials from the conference in open access, and rewrite the coolest videos with letters and words and put it on our blog on Habré.