How IT to go to Germany. Part 1
In the past couple of days, I often have to answer questions about how I found work in Germany, so I decided to combine my entire way (still unfinished) into a single text and publish it here, because the topic seems interesting and relevant to me.
The idea to leave to live somewhere outside this country was a long time ago, but somehow it wasn’t to say that everything here was very bad and unbearable. However, after returning in October from a two-week trip to Europe (Barcelona, ​​Brussels, Amsterdam and Prague), the desire has noticeably strengthened. Plus already pretty much got all these # Krymnyash, oil, the ruble and the great Pu.
The variant with Germany was suggested to me by an acquaintance who is going to go there to study. Googled, and really - for IT people (I'm a Java developer), everything is very good. Information on this topic on the Internet is complete, I will not duplicate it once again (google on the keyword bluecard). In short, the employer's desire to pay you more than 37,000 euros per year is enough.
So, I had a desire to go to Germany to work and live. If you have such thoughts, then you will need knowledge of at least English at a level sufficient for simple dialogue. If you have knowledge of German at least at some level, this will greatly simplify the job search task.
I wrote the resume in English in the form of EuroPass .
Then we get all possible diplomas, certificates and translate them either directly into German or into English, if you look only for English-language work.
')
I began the search directly at the end of November, the number of the 25th. Most IT jobs are posted on monster.de and xing.com . We register on both sites, on xing we fill out a profile from our resume. I wrote a small utility to send the same type of email to the email and began to collect a database of addresses for response. The keyword "java" began the search. Immediately weed out vacancies in which it is explicitly stated that knowledge of the German language is required. Left those that are written in English, or in German, but nothing is said about the language. I sent a letter to resigned emails with resumes, diplomas and certificates of the following content:
For all the search I sent out about 150 letters. In most cases, they refused immediately because they did not know German (approximately 80% of responses). About 15% said that they would consider my candidacy, and in a couple of weeks they wrote that I was not suitable for them. I didn’t get very upset because I understood that it doesn’t matter how many failures there are, I just have to go through just one vacancy.
So, about a week after the start of sending your resume, the first positive reviews and invitations to talk on the phone began to appear. Recruiters from Germany can easily call you in the middle of the day, so think up in advance where you can quickly retire. However, not all of these, many still assign a specific time. Following the results, I spoke with 5 recruiters. I wrote to the company with which everything grew together on December 7th and on the 12th I received an answer saying that they are ready to consider my candidacy. I was immediately sent a link to the test task at codility.com . There were 4 small tasks from the category “write a binary search in an array”. All tasks are given 2 hours, but this is much in excess. The next day, HR wrote to me that I scored 365 points out of 400 and they are happy to invite me to Skype interview with the developer.
On December 15, we phoned on Skype with a developer from the company (he turned out to be Russian, but spoke to him in English :)). At first, there was also a bit of programming in the shared-screen mode — one task of the same level as in the online test. Then a series of questions on Java followed - multi-threading, collections, spring, hibernate, databases, application servers and everything that you have written there and is not written in the summary.
A couple of hours after the interview, I wrote to HR again and said that they were ready to conduct the next stage of the interview with me in 2 days. I already talked to the lead developer, but the format of the conversation was exactly the same - coding, then questions.
The next day, December 18, HR told me with joy that they invited me for an interview to their office. Due to the upcoming holidays, January 16 turned out to be the nearest possible date. I had a Schengen visa, I could fly even the next day. I paid the tickets back and forth, a month passed and so I flew to Munich.
On the appointed day I flew to Munich. For a couple of hours that I had free, I did not say that I fell in love with him, but I really liked the city. So, I came to the office. I was also told in the letter that there would be 3 rounds by the hour, 2 people at each hour. First, 2 developers came and had the same kind of conversation as they had previously on Skype (and again programming, yes).
The next stage took place with the customer service manager and another developer, but he was already talking about all sorts of situations in the development process: what to do if you suddenly found a jamb of your code in production, how you would look for it, how to fix and deploy the patch; what if the day before a big release comes to you and they ask you to remake some things very urgently - and stuff like that.
The third stage was held with the vice-president for development, another leading developer and HR manager. There have already been questions that annoy me a lot and have not been asked for a long time in Russia at interviews: name your strengths / weaknesses; who you see yourself in our company in 5 years; sell us yourself in 2 minutes - in my opinion these questions tell almost nothing about a person. Although judging by the fact that after each of my answers (I, of course, prepared in advance), I was required to say something else and had to improvise, the interviewers wanted to see what my reaction would be. At this stage I messed up a lot, as it seemed to me.
According to the results, they promised to give me an answer next week.
The next week has passed, but no one wrote to me. Already on Monday, January 26, I wrote myself, and apparently it was the last test, since a rather large letter with an offer came to me in a minute (that is, the answer was ready, but it was simply not sent). Everything suited me, I asked to send a contract to the email and the original by courier service. On Friday, they brought the contract, I gave all the necessary documents for the embassy to translate and made an appointment for the delivery of documents for a national visa.
For now this is all I can tell. Following the results of obtaining a visa and the process of moving I will write the second part :)
The idea to leave to live somewhere outside this country was a long time ago, but somehow it wasn’t to say that everything here was very bad and unbearable. However, after returning in October from a two-week trip to Europe (Barcelona, ​​Brussels, Amsterdam and Prague), the desire has noticeably strengthened. Plus already pretty much got all these # Krymnyash, oil, the ruble and the great Pu.
The variant with Germany was suggested to me by an acquaintance who is going to go there to study. Googled, and really - for IT people (I'm a Java developer), everything is very good. Information on this topic on the Internet is complete, I will not duplicate it once again (google on the keyword bluecard). In short, the employer's desire to pay you more than 37,000 euros per year is enough.
Training
So, I had a desire to go to Germany to work and live. If you have such thoughts, then you will need knowledge of at least English at a level sufficient for simple dialogue. If you have knowledge of German at least at some level, this will greatly simplify the job search task.
I wrote the resume in English in the form of EuroPass .
Then we get all possible diplomas, certificates and translate them either directly into German or into English, if you look only for English-language work.
')
Work searches
I began the search directly at the end of November, the number of the 25th. Most IT jobs are posted on monster.de and xing.com . We register on both sites, on xing we fill out a profile from our resume. I wrote a small utility to send the same type of email to the email and began to collect a database of addresses for response. The keyword "java" began the search. Immediately weed out vacancies in which it is explicitly stated that knowledge of the German language is required. Left those that are written in English, or in German, but nothing is said about the language. I sent a letter to resigned emails with resumes, diplomas and certificates of the following content:
Hello!
I was interested in your job application Java Programmer published on monster.de. I want to use your Java programmer.
I have 6 years of experience using information systems using the Spring, J2EE-components, databases and UI frameworks. I have a work experience with application servers and Java-related tools. You can see your attachment.
I hope that through my work experience I will be a new member of your Java programming team.
Salary Expectations - € XXXXX.
Earliest possible start date - mid February 2015.
Sincerely yours,
Ilya Ermolov
Java Developer
Moscow, Russia
For all the search I sent out about 150 letters. In most cases, they refused immediately because they did not know German (approximately 80% of responses). About 15% said that they would consider my candidacy, and in a couple of weeks they wrote that I was not suitable for them. I didn’t get very upset because I understood that it doesn’t matter how many failures there are, I just have to go through just one vacancy.
Interview
So, about a week after the start of sending your resume, the first positive reviews and invitations to talk on the phone began to appear. Recruiters from Germany can easily call you in the middle of the day, so think up in advance where you can quickly retire. However, not all of these, many still assign a specific time. Following the results, I spoke with 5 recruiters. I wrote to the company with which everything grew together on December 7th and on the 12th I received an answer saying that they are ready to consider my candidacy. I was immediately sent a link to the test task at codility.com . There were 4 small tasks from the category “write a binary search in an array”. All tasks are given 2 hours, but this is much in excess. The next day, HR wrote to me that I scored 365 points out of 400 and they are happy to invite me to Skype interview with the developer.
On December 15, we phoned on Skype with a developer from the company (he turned out to be Russian, but spoke to him in English :)). At first, there was also a bit of programming in the shared-screen mode — one task of the same level as in the online test. Then a series of questions on Java followed - multi-threading, collections, spring, hibernate, databases, application servers and everything that you have written there and is not written in the summary.
A couple of hours after the interview, I wrote to HR again and said that they were ready to conduct the next stage of the interview with me in 2 days. I already talked to the lead developer, but the format of the conversation was exactly the same - coding, then questions.
The next day, December 18, HR told me with joy that they invited me for an interview to their office. Due to the upcoming holidays, January 16 turned out to be the nearest possible date. I had a Schengen visa, I could fly even the next day. I paid the tickets back and forth, a month passed and so I flew to Munich.
Face to face interview
On the appointed day I flew to Munich. For a couple of hours that I had free, I did not say that I fell in love with him, but I really liked the city. So, I came to the office. I was also told in the letter that there would be 3 rounds by the hour, 2 people at each hour. First, 2 developers came and had the same kind of conversation as they had previously on Skype (and again programming, yes).
The next stage took place with the customer service manager and another developer, but he was already talking about all sorts of situations in the development process: what to do if you suddenly found a jamb of your code in production, how you would look for it, how to fix and deploy the patch; what if the day before a big release comes to you and they ask you to remake some things very urgently - and stuff like that.
The third stage was held with the vice-president for development, another leading developer and HR manager. There have already been questions that annoy me a lot and have not been asked for a long time in Russia at interviews: name your strengths / weaknesses; who you see yourself in our company in 5 years; sell us yourself in 2 minutes - in my opinion these questions tell almost nothing about a person. Although judging by the fact that after each of my answers (I, of course, prepared in advance), I was required to say something else and had to improvise, the interviewers wanted to see what my reaction would be. At this stage I messed up a lot, as it seemed to me.
According to the results, they promised to give me an answer next week.
Answer and documents
The next week has passed, but no one wrote to me. Already on Monday, January 26, I wrote myself, and apparently it was the last test, since a rather large letter with an offer came to me in a minute (that is, the answer was ready, but it was simply not sent). Everything suited me, I asked to send a contract to the email and the original by courier service. On Friday, they brought the contract, I gave all the necessary documents for the embassy to translate and made an appointment for the delivery of documents for a national visa.
For now this is all I can tell. Following the results of obtaining a visa and the process of moving I will write the second part :)
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/285688/
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