Everyone loves success stories. And there are quite a lot of them on the hub.
"How I got a $300 job in Silicon Valley"
"How I got a job at Google"
"How I Made $200 at 000"
“How I got to the Top AppStore with a simple exchange rate app”
“How do I…” and a thousand and one more similar stories.
It's great that a person has achieved success and decided to talk about it! Read and enjoy it. But most of these stories have one thing in common: you cannot repeat the path of the author! Either you live at the wrong time, or in the wrong place, or you were born a boy, or ...
I think failure stories are often more helpful in this regard. You just don't have to do what the author did. And this, you see, is much easier than trying to repeat someone else's experience. It’s just that people usually don’t want to share such stories. And I'll tell.
I have worked in systems integration and technical support for many years. A few years ago, I even went to work as a systems engineer in Germany to get more money. But the field of system integration has not inspired me for a long time, and I wanted to change the field to something more profitable and interesting. And at the end of 2015 I came across an article , in which Vladimir describes his path in Data Science. I realized that this is what I need. I knew SQL well and it was interesting for me to work with data. I was particularly impressed by the following graphs:
Even the minimum wage in this area was higher than any salary I have ever made in my entire previous life. I firmly decided to become a machine learning engineer. Following the example of Vladimir, I signed up on coursera.org for a specialization of nine courses: .
I did one course a month. I was very diligent. In each course, I completed all the tasks until I got the highest result. In parallel with this, I took on tasks on kaggle, and I even succeeded!!! It is clear that prizes did not shine for me, but I hit 100 several times.
After five successfully completed courses on coursera.org and one more “Big Data with Apache Spark” on stepik.ru, I felt empowered. I realized that I was starting to get into the subject. I understood in what cases what methods of analysis should be used. I got pretty good at Python and its libraries.
My next step was to analyze the job market. It was necessary to find out what else you need to know in order to get a job. What subject areas are worth studying that are of interest to employers. In parallel with the remaining 4 courses, I wanted to take something more highly specialized. What a particular employer wants to see. This would improve my chances of getting a newbie job with good knowledge but no experience.
I went to a job site to do my analysis. But there were no vacancies within a radius of 10 kilometers. And within a radius of 25 kilometers. And even within a radius of 50 km!!! How so? It can not be!!! I went to another site, then to a third one ... Then I opened the map with vacancies and saw something like THIS:
It turned out that I live in the very center of the anomalous python exclusion zone in Germany. Not a single fucking acceptable job for a machine learning specialist or even a Python developer within a radius of 100 kilometers !!! This is a fiasco, bro!
This picture 100% reflects my state at that moment. It was a low blow that I inflicted on myself. And it really hurt...
Yes, you could go to Munich, Cologne or Berlin - there were vacancies. But there was one major obstacle in the way.
Our initial plan when moving to Germany was this: to go where they take you. It didn't matter to us which city in Germany we were thrown into. The next step is to get comfortable, draw up all the documents and tighten up the language. Well, then rush to the big city to earn more. Our preliminary prospective target was Stuttgart. Big technological city in the south of Germany. And not as expensive as Munich. It's warm and grapes grow there. There are many industrial enterprises, so there are many vacancies with good salaries. High quality of life. Just what we need.
We were thrown by fate in a small town in the very center of Germany with a population of about 100000. We settled down, got used to it, processed all the documents. The city turned out to be very cozy, clean, green and safe. The children went to kindergarten and school. Everything was close. There are very friendly people around.
But in this fairy tale, not only was there no vacancies for machine learning specialists, here even Python was not needed by anyone.
My wife and I began to discuss the option of moving to Stuttgart or Frankfurt ... I began to look for vacancies, look at the requirements of employers, and my wife began to look at an apartment, a kindergarten and a school. After about a week of searching, my wife said to me: “You know, I don’t want to go to Frankfurt or Stuttgart or any other big city. I want to stay here."
And I realized that I completely agree with her. I'm tired of the big city too. Only while I lived in St. Petersburg, I did not understand this. Yes, a big city is an ideal place to build a career and earn money. But not for a comfortable life of a family with children. And for our family, this small town turned out to be just what we needed. Here was everything that we so lacked in St. Petersburg.
We decided to stay until our children grow up.
But what about Python and machine learning? And those six months that I already spent on all this? No way. There are no vacancies nearby! I no longer wanted to spend 3-4 hours a day on the road to work. I have already worked in St. Petersburg for several years: I went with Dybenko to Krasnoye Selo, when the ring road had not yet been built. An hour and a half there and an hour and a half back. Life passes by, and you look at the flashing houses from the window of a car or minibus. Yes, on the road you can read, listen to audiobooks and all that. But it quickly gets boring, and after six months or a year you just kill this time, listening to the radio, music and looking aimlessly into the distance.
I've had failures before. But such nonsense as this, I have not done for a long time. The realization that I could not find a job as a machine learning engineer unsettled me. I quit all courses. I stopped doing anything altogether. In the evenings I drank beer or wine, ate salami and played LoL. So a month passed.
In fact, it is not so important what difficulties life presents you with. Or even you present yourself. What matters is how you overcome them and what lessons you learn from these situations.
"What doesn't kill us makes us stronger." Do you know this wise phrase? So, I think this is complete nonsense! I have a friend who, in the wake of the 2008 crisis, lost his job as a director of a fairly large car dealership in St. Petersburg. What did he do? Right! Like a real man, he went to look for a job. Director's work. And when you didn’t find a director’s job in six months? He continued to look for a job as a director, but in other areas, because. working as a car sales manager or someone other than a director was not comme il faut for him. As a result, he did not find anything for a year. And then he gave up looking for a job in general. The resume hangs on HH - whoever needs it, he will call.
And he sat without work for four years, and his wife earned money all this time. A year later, she got a promotion, and they had more money. And he kept sitting at home, drinking beer, watching TV, playing computer games. Of course, not only that. He cooked, washed, cleaned, went shopping. He turned into a gorged boar. Did all this make him stronger? I don't think so.
I, too, could continue to drink beer and blame employers for not opening vacancies in my village. Or blame myself for being such a fool and not even bothering to look at the vacancies before taking up Python. But there was no point in it. I needed a plan B...
In the end, I gathered my thoughts and did what I should have started with at the very beginning - with demand analysis. I analyzed the IT job market in my city and came to the conclusion that there are:
- 5 vacancies for java developers
- 2 SAP developer vacancies
- 2 vacancies C# developers for MS Navision
- 2 vacancies of some developers for microcontrollers and hardware.
The choice was small:
- SAP is most widely used in Germany. Complex structure, ABAP. This, of course, is not 1C, but then it will be difficult to jump off it. And if you move to another country, then the prospects for finding a good job fall sharply.
- C# under MS Navision is also a specific thing.
- Microcontrollers have disappeared by themselves, because. I still had to learn electronics there.
As a result, in terms of prospects, salaries, prevalence and the possibility of remote work, Java won. In fact, Java chose me, not me.
And what happened next - many already know. I wrote about this in another article: .
So don't repeat my mistakes. A few days of thoughtful analysis can save you a lot of time.
I write about how I changed my life at the age of 40 and moved to Germany with my wife and three children in my telegram channel . I am writing about how it was, what is good and what is bad in Germany, about plans for the future. Short and to the point. Interesting? - Join.
Source: habr.com