Today we are publishing an article by GeekBrains student Sergey Solovyov (), in which he shares his experience of a radical career change - from a loan officer to a back-end developer. In this story, an interesting point is that Sergey changed his specialty, but not the organization - his career began and continues at Home Credit and Finance Bank.
History in brief
Before moving to IT, I worked as a loan officer. I note that this is my first job, I got there, one might say almost by accident. I graduated with a degree in Finance and Credit, after which I served in the army, returned, found a suitable specialty on one of the job sites and started working.
I note that the working conditions are excellent: in the first year, I liked literally everything. This is a flexible schedule, young team, income level. As time went on, the work became less enjoyable, so I wanted to change.
Imagining myself 10 years later, I realized that I would not want to be either a loan officer or a head of the same direction. But what to do? I started sorting through my hobbies and singled out two. The first is chess, the second is technology. If the former can hardly be made one's main occupation (I'm still not a grandmaster), then the latter is quite possible.
Time for change, learning PHP
Realizing that I want to become an IT specialist, I began to select suitable specialties. I wanted to understand programming, and since Internet technologies are developing extremely rapidly in our time, I decided to become a web developer.
One evening at work, I was looking for sites that teach web development. I came across an advertisement for GeekBrains courses, I decided to try the initial free courses. Then I decided to try to go deeper and bought the first course - PHP Programmer. I started going through it in December 2016, and I doubted whether it was worth paying at all, since I had a car on credit, and an additional payment would be burdensome.
I mentioned this moment in a telephone conversation with my mother, and she said that I should not doubt: if it is interesting, then it is worth doing. In general, she is also to blame for the fact that I eventually became a web developer.
After the courses were completed, I realized that this is mine and I would like to develop in this direction. At a certain stage of training, I decided to make a working cashback service. We developed it with a colleague (I still worked as a loan officer, the change of specialty - a little later), and it turned out pretty well, the first users appeared.
New milestone: mastering Python and asynchronous programming
Another year passed, and in the summer of 2017, as a bank employee, I received a notification that the bank was opening a service for selling goods by installments. The sender of the letter was the director of digital business, to whom I decided to send a letter in which I told about my desire to work in his team. Surprisingly, I received a response, though not with an offer, but with advice to learn Python and asynchronous programming.
I followed the advice because I was determined to change my future. And here GeekBrains courses came in handy again. The cost of the courses was very impressive, but I decided not to give up on my goal, I even thought about selling the car, repaying the loan for it and paying for the courses.
This is how developers spend their free time
I probably would have done that, but I was lucky - the bank helped, at the suggestion of the chairman of the board, with whom I managed to contact during the direct line with employees. This event is held once a year, employees ask management any questions, and they answer them. I asked if there was a practice of co-financing education, and received the answer that it was not, but in my case the bank would help. And so it happened, as an aid received an increase in salary to pay for courses. Now there is an additional motivation: after all, since they believed me and help me, it will no longer be possible to be lazy or give up my intentions.
By the way, at times it was very difficult, since the brain had already lost the habit of such significant loads since the university, but I liked it, I made learning a part of my life. During the year I studied at home, and at work, one might say, I rested, the change of activity helped. I gave up part of the entertainment without any problems, deciding to spend my time studying. By the way, if you feel that you do not have time, you can re-sign to another stream and go through the difficult moment again.
Moving to St. Petersburg: I ββbecome a developer officially
After I already began to feel confident as a developer, I gave a request for a business trip to St. Petersburg to the development department. We managed to agree on two test days as a developer. And so it happened, and at the end of the second day I was already offered an offer with a trial period. In the end, everything worked out, and they left me in St. Petersburg.
As for the current work, our team is developing a platform for selling goods by installments. My area of ββresponsibility is the backend. Part of the team works from Moscow, part from St. Petersburg. We use an extensive technology stack including Python, asyncio, Django, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Docker.
An interesting point: I moved after about 60% of the course when the main Python program ended. Now I continue to study in the process of work.
At the moment, my sources of knowledge are not only courses, but also technical documentation, forums, colleagues. Books are also a great source of additional information, but unfortunately, there is not enough time for them yet.
A little about income and working conditions
As for working conditions, it is difficult to say how much better things have become. It is only clear that the conditions have changed, and drastically. The metro ride takes about an hour a day, by car it takes longer due to traffic jams, so I sold the car almost immediately after the move. At the last job, the road took only 5 minutes.
At the same time, now I can work from home - we have a relatively free schedule. Moreover, I like the work so much that sometimes I write code for a working project in the evenings. Colleagues are even sometimes surprised that I draw up merge requests on the weekends.
As for the workflow, everything is completely different here. If earlier you came to work and work, now decompositions, retrospectives, stand-ups and everything else have appeared in the workflow. During development, our team is looking for the most effective ways to solve problems together, we listen to each other, we can say that we have complete democracy and almost complete harmony.
Team on vacation
Income has increased, now it is 2-3 times more. At the last job, the income level was floating, so that the salary in one month could be several times higher than the previous period. But on average, yes, the increase is very significant.
I really like St. Petersburg as a place of life. I did not care where to move, but now I am very pleased that I managed to get here. Now I'm thinking about taking a mortgage on an apartment.
First of all, I like it because before and after work you can admire the beautiful architecture, go to a jazz bar on Friday, or to a meeting of programmers, meetups with pizza and beer are regularly held.
As for my career, at this stage I like the process of writing code and learning new technologies, so I hope to grow to a senior developer in a couple of years. IT provides great opportunities - if you want, you can move to another country without any problems and start life from scratch there. So here everyone will find what he likes.
Advice for beginners
Despite the fact that the opinion βeveryone can become a programmerβ is very common, I would not say so. IT, like any other field, is not for everyone. Success here can only be achieved if you like it.
If so, then you can start with Habr - select "All Streams", that is, categories of materials, view materials that are close to you in spirit, and supplement the information received with YouTube videos.
In the event that you decide to become a developer, you need to spend some time choosing a direction - and it is better to spend more time right away, from the very beginning, than to regret the wrong choice later. It will not be superfluous to look at HH to understand the level of salaries of different specialists.
Well, as for training, you can take it on your own, but I would still recommend the courses, because they give a systematic approach, practice, teachers' answers to your questions. In the case of self-learning, you can spend much more time achieving the same result. Of course, it all depends on the person.
After that, it is worth making a study plan, gradually moving towards the intended goal in the form of a good job, a new life and new tasks.
Source: habr.com