You are only 25 and you already have four companies behind you - what's wrong with you?

This article may be of interest to young IT professionals as well as recruiters who want to understand the generation Z of applicants better. There will be no tips on how to find a job, my story will be described here with a hint of why the young specialist should be attentive to what is happening around and trust no one.

Foreword

As, perhaps, many other IT people, “in the subject” I entered at the beginning of high school. Some experiments with games for mobile phones on Java ME, shamanism with firmware for the first Android, the foundation and maintenance of one of the currently resting warez portal on this platform, help friends and myself in solving various computer issues.

By the time I entered university, I had the experience of Linux and Windows system administration, knowledge of PC hardware, and thanks to studying the ADSL home modem and Tanenbaum works, the beginnings of network knowledge. The bonus was the completed programming courses in C.

Where to go further - the answer to this question was found after a scrupulous study of possible universities, training programs in various specialties and even a survey in the social networks of young graduates of specialties, with some of which I still maintain communication. In general, I moved into a telecom for a young specialty, providing for a very strong influence in the 21st century IT on communications. As you can tell right now, the training program was built with a focus on OSS / BSS engineers.
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About places

I found the first job already in the 2nd year, it was a fairly large Internet provider, and thanks to my knowledge I immediately found myself on level 2 support with access to Access and Aggregation in RW and R mode to Core network levels. I quickly got comfortable with the applications and began to notice frequent problems, and in the end I automated their solution with literally 10 buttons with several input fields located on 1 web page. Applications to our level began to come in much less, the high authorities were quite and considering this and other successes, they offered to have an interview with the head of the department in the related department dealing with infrastructure development. The main requirement was the knowledge of static routing and English (I speak fluent), but the head of the “planted” me with a question about erlangs, who study at the end of 3 courses and google for 5 minutes, where the conversation stopped. It was also mentioned that it is unbecoming for a person without higher education to sit with engineers and in general there are doubts whether I will manage to combine university and work. Taking into account the fact that at the current place I was already “pumped out” to the maximum, and to wait for the next step for another couple of years before graduation from the university, I decided not to stay up and leave.

Then there were three more companies - somewhere I remotely supported the clients of our data center where applications were hosted on Linux servers, by the way, we were also responsible for the availability of applications; worked somewhere in customer support for the IoT system with a focus on the fuel industry, there were companies with AI projects in AWS, it was in the end what is now fashionable to call DevOps: Ansible, Jenkins, scripting, warm and trashshuting web apps.

Almost all this time I was a full-time student, and contrary to the prophecy, the leaders from the first company managed to do everything and even started a circle of amateurs to delve into the network gland that had been gathering dust in the department. Helped teachers with labs, a university network, and students from the circle - with tips on what to do so as not to be left for 2 years after the university at a loss-making factory. [spoiler, nobody got to the factory]

So, why did I leave with three subsequent companies? Perhaps, in the first place - the actions of people, at odds with their own words. On the second - sometimes unpleasant senior colleagues.

As I understand now, seeing a young specialist with fire in his eyes and real knowledge, there is a great temptation to promise him many, many hopes that he will get used to and forget in the process.

In one place, in case of success, the criteria for which are strictly described in the corporate rulebook, which was demonstrated during the interview, the employee was promised to move up the stairs from one level to another: say, from the level of a support employee to a junior administrator with his fully trusted fleet of cars . As a result, the criteria were achieved by me somewhere a little more than six months, the salary was honestly raised, but I still remained a support employee with a shiftable work schedule of 12 hours. Even for a 19 year old, this is very difficult. Talking with the management and reminding of these promises about growth did not lead to anything, and one of the senior administrators who quite expressively “taught to live” irritated almost every day shift, so I left them, giving me a whole month to search for a replacement for myself.

Somewhere, respectable people with a fleet of servers of several million dollars and investments for dozens told me about transferring the infrastructure to DevOps rails and actually transferring all the current Operations to them, well, the first months everything was like that, but the course of investor vision changed dramatically and who - I decided that IT / Operations / DevOps should be (in the company, in principle, there was no IT, because the local infrastructure was weeping, and all the experts were not lower than Middle, and even the accountant could solve their problems). I was called to the conversation by the head of the department, told me how cool I was and that I had to go to IT as the youngest in the team, partially taking over the configuration of the local infrastructure for the new office that had grown in an arithmetic progression. To the objection that I don’t want and do a great job with DevOps, why use my dear Linux-coder if I can hire a 40-year-old “administrator with experience in managing 500 client Windows systems and 1 server”, such as I did not find, and it is dangerous to take students - the price of their potential error will be more than their savings on replacing me. I left the company, not wanting to carry out tasks for a lot of money from changing the hard drives in local RAID and admin a couple of ciskov pieces of iron, before changing the batteries in mice to the blonde secretaries who appeared in the team - I didn’t go there for that and didn’t agree to this when I found a job .

There was also a company in which everyone was verbally friendly and abrupt in words, the criteria for growth were also obvious and listed in internal documents. However, I left her when I learned that I was extended a three-month trial period without my knowledge because of insufficient empathy to the problems of clients. With which, by the way, I have never communicated in fact anything except email, and they gave me good grades for solved problems, and the schedule of solved tasks grew faster than the hired colleagues working synchronously with me. In terms of technical competence, I was highly appreciated, especially this infuriated the experienced uncle colleague. It is difficult to be young and smart in a team with people with whom the age difference can reach 20 years. I left it also because the working tool - the monitor was an extremely cheap TN + Film, and my eyes literally “flowed out” after the day of work. Requests to issue a new ignored. There was an interesting transition on my career path - I was leaving a higher wage to a lower (30%), just for the sake of experience and a thirst for development.

There was also a big enterprise-mastodon in which my management after two weeks of my work fired my immediate manager, who nibbled at the company’s background during all the past six years of her work and was the only one in the company who, in addition to the manager’s head, fumbled in DevOps methodologies and I was looking for my right hand, with which I planned to start raking the pattern of the development cycle that had settled over the years. In fact, I was left alone, and, as it happened, in view of the highly incomplete staff, they began to load me with a completely non-core work of the internal project manager, which were in fact orphaned. Being the “owner of these services” reluctantly, to which a lot was tied up in the company, I ordered and monitored the correctness of the edits on the hardware and software of various departments. It was considered corporate chic to hold meetings on every revision, diverting many people from their work. Nowhere else, as in this company, I did not hold and did not attend so many meetings. For a couple of months working there, I participated in many activities useful for development as a project manager, DevOps only revived several Jenkins instances with jobs that died after the dismissal of the head of my department, participated in the development of several projects.

Several times explaining to senior management why the company cannot do DevOps until more earthly problems such as wild routine, strange dismissals and reluctance of the company's old-timers to implement DevOps tools like static code analyzers are solved, left after receiving an offer to become a project manager already officially.
It was tempting and I thought for a long time, but in the end I came to the conclusion that in 22 I manage people who are not interested in anything other than technologies and methodologies in which they have been cooking for twenty years, and who are older than me are not very effective and productive .

So what now? For a couple of years I have been working with DevSecOps in a well-known company in narrow circles, which solves the problems of the telecommunications domain of any complexity, in the development department. Tasks to be solved and working conditions correspond to those discussed at the interview, there are no everyday questions and questions about the working gland, the management is as open as possible and, according to their own words, the fears that occurred when they received me with a rich history of changing jobs to them were behind.

Peace to all, and, as an epilogue, I will leave a quotation from a manager I encountered during my career as a manager, which I greatly respected:

-Don't get used to it!