HeadHunter programming school - as it really was

Foreword

In early September last year, HeadHunter announced the fifth recruitment to the annual school of programmers. They promised to “teach programming” and teach back-end development. I became interested in this offer and decided to try my hand. From the official source it was not very clear how the training would be conducted. Now that I know exactly how it goes, I want to tell about it, so that it will be easier for others to decide whether to go there or not.

I will begin with a brief story about myself: I am a 4th year student at the Department of Mathematical Modeling of the Moscow Power Engineering Institute. 2 years worked as a C ++ programmer. I am fond of developing for Android, writing sites on Python, interested in various algorithms.

The decision to go to this school was spontaneous - I was not going to switch to web development (the school prepares site developers), but did not rule out this possibility. I wanted to try new things - I tried. And that's what came of it.

Arrival

Entering the school consisted of two stages:

• Qualifying stage (online). It was proposed to solve several algorithmic problems in Python or Java. Different participants got different tasks, I got these two: finding the substring in the string and finding the closest pair of points on the plane .

• Full-time interview. About a month later I was called for an interview. They invited him to 5 people, seated at the tables, gave assignments and left. There were three tasks in total, which required minimal knowledge and programming skills to solve, at the level: what is a stack and how to find the distance between 2 points and know how to evaluate the complexity of algorithms (tasks, though not complicated, but cumbersome, therefore I do not describe here). Distributed tasks and left. About an hour later, they began to call one by one to the next room, where they discussed these tasks from the beginning, and then asked questions about the experience, asked to solve simple tasks to be smart, asked how the map was arranged in java.

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Did

A couple of weeks I received an invitation to study at school.

In early November, the first lesson was held. On it we were told about the school in more detail, and most importantly - fed. Yes, there were great sandwiches and juice. And then two hours sat and communicated in a less formal setting, both with each other and with the developers of the company, where they could learn more about the school and about the company and about the stack of applied technologies.

The group scored not very large, 14 people. Basically, these were graduates or students of mathematical specialties of the largest universities in Moscow.

Training

It went all in two stages. At the first stage, participants listened to lectures and performed tasks, and at the second they were engaged in project activities, but they still needed to reach the second stage.

To teach or not to teach themselves to honor?
The training took place according to the principle: we give you minimal knowledge and complex tasks, and then ourselves. This approach implies that the student will spend a lot of time on independent study of the material. Then the question is brewing - “why then school?”. It seems to me that in order to direct the forces of self-education in the right direction, those minimal knowledge gave a sufficient basis to understand which queries to enter into a search engine. I like this approach - you do not spend too much time on lectures that you can attend at a convenient time. By the way, they also gave coffee and cookies, as employees, which could not but rejoice.

What was taught and how
We studied about the following: bash, java, git, python, postgreSQL, agile (a whole series of lectures was devoted to him, and this, in my opinion, is very good), testing, JS, etc.

Almost every new lecture is a new technology / language / principle and a new lecturer, and the lecturers were the developers of the company.
Some lecturers surprised me - they took the preparation very seriously and managed to tell a huge amount of information in two or three hours. And not only to tell, but also to teach her to use.

But still, about half of the lectures were absolutely useless; this happened for various reasons. One of them is that the lecturer explained the topic as if he was on the exam at the university and he didn’t need to be taught how to work with technology and not to err in the name, as a result of which those who knew nothing new did not learn, and those who didn’t know - did not get anything. Another reason for the bad lectures was that the lecturers came absolutely unprepared and gave out phrases like this: “I was asked to give you a lecture. I don’t know what I have to talk about, so I’ll tell you what I told my development team a week ago. ”

Attempt to improve lectures
Due to the poor quality of some of the lectures, we began to write to the school’s management that something needs to be changed. By correspondence, it was decided to introduce feedback to each lecture. Feedback introduced, but we did not notice the changes.
This situation made me hesitate - I was sorry for wasted time. But after the class lectures I was sorry to miss the subsequent lectures, in the end I went to almost everything.

Back to school?
The learning process itself corresponded exactly to the name “school”: we went to classes, we were celebrated, we were given marks for the tasks we performed. Only here there was another flaw: it was assumed that assignments would review our code, but this was not always the case. And not because it was not supposed to, but because the school did not calculate its strength and the lecturer did not have time to check these tasks, and therefore the rules of assessment changed, and this happened after delivery.

Leaving school

Most jobs were given in January - February. In the same period, I started a session at the institute and I was not able to attend lectures and perform assignments, in connection with which I had a lot of inconvenience and a little desire to return to this school because of the hard work. Why rake when you can leave? This ended my hesitations about whether it was worth going to lectures or not.

A similar fate befell the majority of my classmates, and only a few people were invited to the second part.

Conclusion

Now there is a big lack of personnel in IT, and the idea of ​​organizing a school is great.

In my opinion, the organization of the school was quite irresponsible. Maybe there was not enough allocated funds - the school was free.

I did not complete my studies, but despite this, I believe that this school was very useful for me - I learned a stack of technologies for creating websites, I learned agile principles.