I would like to write that when I was 8 years old, I found a book on C on the shelf and I realized that I want to connect my life with programming. But unfortunately, my way to my dream job was a bit of a twist. My education is a linguistic gymnasium and later a translation department. In my first year at the university, I started working as a translator for a large insurance company. The work did not bring me any pleasure. And at the age of 23, after changing companies many times, I decided to listen to the internal voice and try my hand at programming.
The beginning.
Since my experience was zero, I decided to try to find a job in a web studio, but I was not interested in my position, I just needed to find myself in this area. Coming to the interview for the position of content manager, I honestly admitted why I'm here and that I'm unimaginably attracted to writing code. That's how I got the job as a tester, and it was a great deal of luck. Of course, I didn't write the unit tests, it all started with the usual manual testing, but I started to implement the plan to change the sphere of activity with new strength. Then the work on myself began. Eavesdropping on the conversations of my fellow programmers, reading books that were given with great difficulty, the first typed site, nightmares about the 6th version of IE and the layout of rounded corners before the appearance of border-radius. After working for the company for three years and at the same time pumping skills of PHP and Javascript, I finally found a job as a PHP programmer in another web studio.
Then there were more serious projects - news portal, online training platform, payment systems aggregator. After I joined a large IT company in my region and became a confident Middle Web Developer for twenty-eight years, I asked myself, "What's next? And I decided that I would try to move on.
Preparing for interviews.
I started by creating a quality profile at LinkedIn. From the first time I failed to do it well, the profile consisted of dry facts and brief descriptions of projects, nobody would be interested in reading such a thing, I sent a link to my more experienced colleagues, after making a lot of changes and revision of the text the profile became more readable.
Try to present yourself beautifully, try to tell interestingly about the project, what you have brought to it, what difficulties you faced and how you solved them. Such a profile will be more interesting to read to the recruiter. Ask more experienced people to re-read your profile.
In addition to LinkedIn, I have read articles and books about what kind of questions you might encounter in an interview. I was pulling up the theory. I studied English on Skype with a teacher, because I hadn't used the language for many years and it was at the level of "I understand everything, but I can't say anything". At the same time, I started to send letters to large companies, went to the official websites of the companies in the jobs section and looked at whether there were any vacancies at the moment. I decided to write even in Blizzard, of course I was refused, but no one would cut your hand off for trying to do so.
First interviews.
The company from Berlin was the first to respond to my letter. I sent the letter early in the morning and in the evening I received an answer and an invitation to Skype interview with HR, I did not expect such a quick response. But, unfortunately, I was only able to get an interview with HR and the project manager, the technical interview was out of my league, I clearly lacked academic knowledge. The story was repeated in several subsequent interviews, but I felt much more confident each time. During the interviews, I always kept my notebook ready to write down questions I didn't know the answer to and to work on them further. Live coding was also a great stress, but it was also a pleasure to try to program something when someone is watching it closely and breathing into the microphone.
At the interview you can get a huge experience, even if you fail it with a crackle. You'll know where to go and what to pull up.
Success.
After such an experience, I decided to postpone the move for a year, and in a year I decided to pull up all the knowledge that was not enough to pass the interviews, but I was interested in the company from Finland. They were looking for someone with experience in creating a payment system aggregator. Having a rather negative experience of interviews, I decided to try again, but did not have much hope. My first interview was with HR. Then I had an interview with a leading programmer, we talked about my previous projects without touching upon any technical issues. When I got to the stage of the technical interview, I thought I'd just relax, I'm not likely to go any further, but the interview took place in a very different way.
At the first stage I was interviewed by a backend programmer, in addition to theoretical questions on PHP, OOP, SQL, I was asked questions that were close to what is actually used in practice, of course there was live coding. The second stage of the interview was conducted by a front-end programmer, followed by questions from the project manager. The interview lasted about three hours, although I read about the cases and longer interviews, but three hours of stress was enough for me to get exhausted.
A couple of days later, I received a letter congratulating me on my successful completion of the technical interview and description of the test task. The test task was offered to be implemented in any convenient language and in general was given complete freedom of action and choice of technologies, but the task had to be spent no more than 3 hours. Therefore, we had to stop ourselves when we wanted to add some small and interesting features and focus on the basic functionality. I was answered three days later with an invitation to the on site interview. The company paid for the travel and living expenses. All I had to do was get a shengen. This was my first big win.
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