Survival conditions for an IT person
— What are the main difficulties that an IT specialist faces when he enters
- In fact, IT specialists have enough problems. Most of them are young professionals, but also those who have been on the market for a long time have to change, adapt to new conditions and technological innovations. Therefore, the main condition for "survival" for a specialist of any level can be called permanent training.
Young professionals come to the forelack of professional certificates and experience in large international projects. The path of development is individual for different profiles of IT professionals. For myself, I chose the Cloud / DevOps-oriented line of Red Hat certifications - it is long, difficult and expensive. But the advantage of this direction is the lack of a sufficient number of such specialists in the international market. And this increases the demand and income of a certified IT specialist.
DevOps (from the English. Development and operations - "development and operation")— a set of practices aimed at active interaction between development specialists and IT service specialists and the mutual integration of their work processes into each other.
DevOps product development and optimizationis faster than using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. With this speed, companies can improve customer service and compete more effectively in the market.
In the DevOps model, the boundaries between development teamsand operation are erased. Sometimes these two groups are combined into one general, where engineers work on the entire life cycle of an application — from development and testing to deployment and operation — and develop a range of skills, not limited to narrow specialization.
There are also purely psychological problems.Fear of moving and radical changes in life. Many are simply afraid to change their lives: there are friends and parents here, but how can I manage there alone? But if you don’t change anything in your life, then the likelihood of success in the international market is low. This also includes insufficient motivation. Sometimes people simply don’t want to achieve anything, because they are used to their parents and loved ones helping, arranging and organizing.
Photo: Regina Urazaeva / "Haytek"
For me personally, it was difficult to overcome myselfand your laziness. The specialist is obliged to speak English, but many just too lazy to spend time and make efforts to develop their level. My English was at the zero level, but due to motivation, having spent a lot of time and effort, it ceased to be my disadvantage, but became a competitive advantage, especially in the Russian market. The problem of laziness is not so straightforward, and, as a rule, there are a lot of factors behind it that every person needs to solve - independently or with the help of specialists.
- Why among all IT areas you have chosen the architecture of computing systems, and what problems do you have to solve?
- My predilection for the IT world started back in school,when we got the first computers and the game Doom. I wondered how the computer works, and this curiosity is still the basis of my work. Then there was an experience with Unix-systems and a more intensive study of technology, which began at the University of Voronezh State University (Vyatka State University - "High-Tech"). I was a campus system administrator.
Unix- a family of portable, multi-tasking andmulti-user operating systems that are based on the ideas of the original AT&T Unix project, developed in the 1970s at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and others.
Doom- a series of computer games in the shooter genre fromfirst person, developed by id Software. The series follows the exploits of an unnamed space marine working for the United Aerospace Corporation and fighting against hordes of demons in order to survive and save the Earth from their attack.
If we talk about my direction - "architecturecomputational structures ", the main difficulties can be divided into three large groups. The first is extremely rapidly developing technologies and solutions. In the world of open source solutions, IT products appear, change, or even go faster and faster. The architect should always be aware of such changes, work with them, as he is obliged to competently use this knowledge in the course of his work.
The second side is the architect’s responsibility for the decisions made. At a minimum, this is reflected in its demand. In the worst case scenario, customers suffer financial losses.
Photo: Regina Urazaeva / "Haytek"
And the last is a kind of routine and bureaucracy.workflows. An architect is a technical role, a lot of paper work, but without this in any way. This is a managerial position. Most likely, the architect can be described as a technical manager who focuses on the distribution of work among subordinates in his team. It is the architect who has a full understanding of the project, knows how to achieve the goals, he himself spends a lot of time on the implementation of technical tasks.
"The University will not make you a promising specialist"
— Why is Russia so far behind in the IT market today? What is missing? How to train modern and active learning specialists?
- Personally, I do not work on Russian projects alreadyabout ten years. But I can say that in our country the use of modern products and solutions is five years behind European and American projects. This is due to the lack of qualification personnel and funding, as well as illiterately built technological processes.
As for education, I myself studied atIT-oriented Faculty of Automation and Computer Engineering, and I can say that our educational program is absolutely not adapted to modern solutions. The university will never produce a ready-made IT architect. The university can only provide the basics, but the specialist must study himself.
There are great companies that help intraining and certification of their employees - for example, ICL, where I worked for about seven years. If there is a desire to learn and develop, then you need to look for opportunities, not excuses, or shift the responsibility to education or someone. Private educational centers are very useful and can greatly accelerate the development of a specialist, but this is more than expensive if you pay yourself.
- How can an IT specialist develop the competencies necessary for career growth and market demand?
- Every year one university puts on the markethundreds of young cadres. Due to the imperfection of educational programs, such young specialists cannot even compete with each other, let alone the market. Therefore, about their future profession is better to think in high school. And when pursuing higher education, independently study current technologies and be interested in their profession. Very well, if you can get some experience in the IT department of your university.
Photo: Regina Urazaeva / "Haytek"
You should never expect a universitymake you a very promising specialist. I do not know how well things are in other professions, but in IT self-education is in the first place.
In the IT world itself, there are tens or hundreds of areas whereyou can develop - programming, development of microprocessor systems, audit and security, network systems, design and graphics, and many others. Understanding and choosing what really suits you best is a very difficult task. The price of a mistake may be a change of direction or a complete disappointment in the profession. Therefore, it is also very important to decide what you will do in your life. And of course, IT is not a job from nine to five. Being an IT person is a full-fledged life in this, a hobby, work, free time at home and even on vacation.
Expanding horizons, learning new technologies,the invention of their techniques, the implementation of complex projects, the training of other specialists is an incomplete set of recommendations, following which one can develop a competitive specialist.
Increasing the probability of winning
- You are an example of building a successful career in spite of conditions rather than thanks. What was your main motivation?
- Everything I managed to achieve happenedthanks to my character. I had no one to hope for. Ever since I studied at the boarding school, I have learned well: if I do not achieve anything myself, then I will end up with nothing. The motivation was to prove to everyone, and first of all to myself: I can, I deserve, I will achieve.
Evgeny Dosborn in the small village of Vostochny inKirov region. He received his secondary education at a boarding school located in the village of Tuzha. In high school, Evgeniy thought about entering VSU, but for 50 years only a few graduates from the Tuzhin school entered there, but no one could last longer than one course.
However, after school Eugene in 2000He entered the Kirov Mechanical-Technological College of Light Industry, which he later regretted. Studying at a technical school was mediocre, and the entrance tests at VSU were easy and accessible to Eugene. After KMTT, Eugene worked at the factory as an electrician, worked as a loader and washed cars because of the lack of jobs in the region. This lasted until 2004, until he nevertheless entered the VSU. In the last year of study at the university, Evgeny already fully worked in one of the largest electric power companies in the region as a system administrator.
In 2011, Eugene accepted the job offer forUnix engineer position in ICL company in Kazan. The first project was a large (thousands of servers) project in Sweden. I had to work remotely. The project was associated with the automotive industry and the robotization of industrial production and support for the entire IT infrastructure of the customer. Work in the ICL allowed Eugene to enter the international market.
- Why did you decide to move to Kazan? And how is life in the capital of Tatarstan different?
— My move from the Kirov region to Kazan,First of all, it was determined by the standard of living, the development of infrastructure and the level of salaries, which are an order of magnitude higher there than in my homeland. Large international corporations are also based in Kazan. Cooperation with them is the very necessary experience that every IT specialist needs to gain for a successful leap upward, reaching a new level in his professional activity.
- How is the day of such an IT expert like you?
- Every working day usually starts withstand-up rallies with foreign customers, where there is usually both an architect team on the part of the customer and someone from the management team. We discuss the completed work from the last working day and plan tasks for the current day. This helps each team member to be aware of all the work and processes that are present in the team, and if anyone has a problem, he can ask for support from colleagues and discuss the situation. Further, I independently plan my tasks depending on the daily rallies and meetings and get down to work by connecting remotely to the customer's infrastructure.
Photo: Regina Urazaeva / "Haytek"
- Tell us about what you are doing now.
- My last project was one of the most difficult. I worked for a large American corporation. My tasks as an architect included planning, organizing and executing CI-process migration (CI, Eng. Continuous Integration, continuous integration - “High-tech”) from one solution (TeamCity) to another (Jenkins).
During the implementation of this project, I visitedUSA and India, in order to deliver professional courses for hundreds of company developers. The implementation of this project allowed the customer to automate the entire CI infrastructure, simplify the work for code developers, significantly reduce the life cycle time of application development, significantly simplify the work of DevOps engineers of the company, and as a result save a significant amount of money.
Thanks to the courses I taught fordevelopers of the company in both countries, employees understood all the benefits from the implementation of the project and learned to effectively use the acquired knowledge in their daily work.
- Why did you choose Red Hat and what did the certification give you? How long did the preparation for certification last and how much did it cost?
- The choice fell on the certification line Red Hatnot by chance. By this time I had been working for overseas customers for several years and understood one simple truth for myself. Large businesses prefer to invest large resources in their IT systems only so that they work predictably, and in case of failures, the developer could solve the problems at a given time. Although the most popular Linux OS comes in the open form at no cost, companies do not seek to use the free version, but give preference to commercial counterparts of free systems. One of the suppliers of products for this model is Red Hat. It is the leader in the US market in terms of the supply of commercial solutions based on open source.
Red hatis an American company that produces solutions forbased on the Linux operating system: Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora, as well as other open source software products and services. Red Hat Software was formed in 1995 by the merger of the projects of Mark Ewing and Bob Young.
I took up certification when I was still working atKazan. ICL Services had a program to support certification professionals. This was beneficial both to the company itself - the higher the qualifications of its employees, the higher the likelihood of winning tenders, and to me - I was already involved as a consultant on many issues, my opinion gained weight and in the future the final technical decisions remained with me. Compared to colleagues who were not involved in certification, I was already out of competition.
I earned my first certification statusin 2011. The latest certification examination was obtained in 2018. For all this time I have passed 18 exams in different countries of the world. I invested a lot of money for some exams, while the associated costs amounted to a round sum, including flights, accommodation, trips abroad, plenty of free time and vacation at my own expense.
“How different we are”
- How much is the level of IT people abroad and in Russia? Why travel, internships and travel are necessary for the development of a sought-after specialist?
- I think that the difference is not in IT specialists, but inhow different we are. It is no secret that most technologies are born in Silicon Valley. Corporations appear and are born there. As a rule, technologies that have been tested and have proven themselves come to Russia. Therefore, no matter how insulting it is to admit it, the Russian IT specialist just works with what comes from the West. Of course, in Russia, too, many new things are being created - and are being created by the hands of domestic specialists. But, as a rule, in order for their ideas to continue to live and develop, they leave for the West.
Photo: Regina Urazaeva / "Haytek"
The main reason for the backlog, oddly enough,lies in the ignorance of English. The average IT pros can read professional literature at best. In a sense, this makes us consumers. It is unlikely that someone will pay attention to the development of Russian specialists, if they are performed only in Russian. Most likely, the world simply will not know about it.
On the other hand, I know many Russiancompanies providing services to Western customers. This suggests that our specialists are well trained, and the cost of such services is lower than if a foreign contractor did the same thing.
At some point in time it became apparent thatMy qualification exceeds the requirements in the local market, and the only thing that remains in this case is to work for foreign customers. But in this mode it is inconvenient to work, at least because of the difference in time zones, so you are already thinking about moving. Of course, you can work on domestic customers, but in this case, the income will be lower than you can have in Western countries.
— In Russia, the transition to container solutions, cloud infrastructures, and ready-made business solutions (FaaS solutions) is accelerating. What will happen next?
- The trend of recent years - the adaptation of oldapplications and the development of new with a focus on container insulation. In addition to ease of management and scaling, this approach provides significant flexibility for debugging, testing and deployment, taking into account the full automation of all processes. I am sure that this trend will continue to develop. This is beneficial for the companies themselves, since the conditions for human error are becoming less and less, and the time from development to launch in production is significantly reduced. Companies will continue to strive to increase the automation of IT processes.
- Today, they are increasingly saying that the future is in open source solutions. Why? And what is their advantage over commercial offers?
— In the 1990s and early 2000s, most software wasdeveloped by large companies. They were monopolists or divided markets among themselves. Therefore, such companies occupied a dominant position; consumers were actually obliged to adapt to their requirements. This concerned the limitations of their products, the functionality could not be expanded, since for manufacturers the problems of individual consumers were of little importance, known shortcomings could remain uncorrected for a long time, new functionality was rarely added, licenses cost a lot of money. There were many different reasons why; closed-source programs were in demand, and there were no other alternatives. On the other hand, it was precisely this state of affairs that led programmers to develop the programs they needed and provide access to their source code. Consumers already have a choice: use alternative solutions that they can customize themselves, or continue to invest in commercial products.
The idea of open source software has actually givena revolutionary impetus for the development of the entire IT industry. I think that thanks to the open and free Linux operating system, today we have smartphones that are convenient and accessible to everyone. And a lot of different software that is invisible to ordinary users, such as containers.
Let us think for a moment that if everything in the world is alsowould closed software dominate? It is unlikely that smartphones would be available, if only because the software would have to pay as much as for the hardware and for each individual application, which we also download for free. Most people would still prefer button phones. In turn, a small number of users would not require the development of cellular networks - 4G, 5G, high-speed Internet channels and other related industries. A similar situation occurs inside IT, access to technology creates new ideas and gives new opportunities.
- In the IT field, everything is changing rapidly. What is the age of obsolescence of existing solutions?
- The so-called Unix era dates back to 1January 1970. This is comparable with the beginning of our era in universal human calculus. Only 50 years passed from the first computers to autonomous automobile systems and research stations operating at a distance of billions of kilometers from the earth. In my experience, the life of technology is very short - three to five years. Further or there is a significant rethinking (evolution) of technology, or it just becomes unclaimed due to the fact that something new and more relevant is coming.
Photo: Regina Urazaeva / "Haytek"
- It is impossible to imagine the digital economy without the global implementation of IT in all areas of life. But which industries are pushing the technology itself forward, contributing to the development and modernization?
— IT has firmly entered the everyday life of the majoritypeople, simply because most of its residents have a smartphone. And this is already access to the Internet. People use electronic services for shopping, communicating, obtaining information and much more. All this forces providers of such services to focus on the end consumer and ultimately improve their services - cable network operators are laying new fiber-optic networks across the seas and oceans, mobile operators are developing terrestrial communications - 3G, 4G and, finally, 5G. High demand has arisen for autonomous systems, ranging from shopping delivery robots to heavy-duty vehicle control systems. I think that startups play a huge role here, they constantly offer something new, and if it resonates with users, then large companies pick up the vector and invest billions.
- Are there any prospects for becoming successful in Russia or is it just a matter of building a career in the West or in the Asian market?
- It all depends on many factors andcircumstances. From my own experience I know that you can feel great within one country and be at the technological peak of development, but in a single geography. Another thing is when you enter the external, international market, the world becomes much wider. It all depends on the requirements for himself. Therefore, there is no such dilemma - it is possible ”or“ it is impossible to succeed, it all depends on personal aspiration. Choosing between the West and Asia is a matter of personal preference. IT is a challenge to yourself; nothing is impossible here.
The editors are grateful to the residence of the creative industries of the STAB for their assistance in conducting the survey.