Mikhail Zavileyskiy's seminar "Which professionals 'survive' the crisis?…" and other things

Attended the seminar "Which professionals 'survive' the crisis? Strategies for the balanced development of specialists". On the whole, I came away with a positive impression — it was presented in an interesting way and not boring at all, which is rare for this sort of thing. The main part took about 45 minutes and answering questions took 30 minutes. A lot of what was said is obvious anyway, but you don't always manage to express and put in order what's in your head, and when you hear it from the outside, everything falls into place and settles better. I also got new information to think about.

There were quite a lot of people at the seminar — representatives of various firms in the city, students and university lecturers. It's clear that some of the KhSU students were kept after class to fill out the crowd, but it was hardly the majority. I came, almost ran, after work, right before the start, and registered as number 65 on one of the lists — though it's not clear whether there was one list or several.

It was nice to see familiar faces I hadn't seen in a long time. I sat again at the same table in a lecture hall with classmates I'd sat with during our years of study.

I made notes throughout the seminar and wrote down some of the interesting bits — though there's not much at the beginning of the notes, since I was out of breath and recovering from the fast walking. In the end, enough thoughts and memories came up; most of them are laid out below. If I didn't mention something, it just means I agree with it.

As I already said, what I heard at the seminar prompted some reflections. To begin with, the word "Android" was repeated many times — not by accident, I think. I'm only superficially familiar with DataArt; as I understand it, orders are coming in for this platform and specialists will be needed. I might install it on a Nokia N810 myself and dig around with the system if I had more time.

It was interesting to hear that people rarely change without a major upheaval. To change yourself, you have to immerse yourself in a different environment. This very year I went through an upheaval that led to certain physical changes I couldn't have brought about myself; and I changed my environment to some degree, which leads to psychological changes. Whether these changes are good or bad is hard to say right off without a deep analysis, which I don't feel like doing and which probably wouldn't come out properly anyway. Maybe I'll read the book that was mentioned in connection with this — David Maister's "Strategy and the Fat Smoker: How to Finally Do What's Good for You."

The qualities a specialist needs were also named, and it was emphasized that in a crisis the importance of social qualities matters twice as much… The only quality on the list I haven't developed enough and can barely develop in myself — I'm not sure I can. I think working as a programmer only decreases social skills, or at least does little to help — yes, a lot depends on the person and the environment.

There was talk about the English language, about its importance for specialists. Tomorrow they'll present ideas to the company's own employees on how to improve it. I wonder what they'll be — I study it myself by reading books and watching loads of TV series without translation or with subtitles; I think I've improved the skill subconsciously, only there's no practice to improve and test it because of the weak skills mentioned above.

The second book I noted for myself at the seminar was "The Living Company: Growth, Learning and Longevity in Business" by Arie de Geus — it was named in the course of answering a question about mergers and acquisitions of companies during a crisis.

Of course there was a question about what one should study to increase the chances of getting a job. In response, approximate figures were given: .NET and Java each take up 40% of the market, and the remaining 20% is taken by C++ and the rest. For the world, I think the figures are right, but not for Kherson. After all, the junior Java people at DataArt have been without work for over a year now, and at the Kherson branch of Aricent .NET vacancies haven't appeared for over a year either — judging by the fact that an HR person recently called with a job offer in another city (Vinnytsia), saying I'd made a good impression at the interview and had been remembered. Or am I just being naive? I think a free spot appearing there, one that's already taken, has more to do with the flu epidemic than with the economy. How things stand with vacancies at large firms aimed at established specialists, I don't know.

It wasn't only me in the hall who found it strange to hear that DataArt needs young specialists and is about to recruit them, knowing that the young specialists already on the company's books have been unemployed for over a year. Or maybe change really is beginning now and we're starting to come out of the crisis, and to come out of the crisis, everyone first has to be convinced that we're coming out of it.

The most important and least obvious thing said, I think, was that you should learn and develop not for the sake of certificates and getting hired into a targeted vacancy, but for the sake of making your own project, one that's interesting to yourself, which in the end will be interesting to others, and learning while creating it. I arrived at this myself over the past year, having confirmed it through my own experience.

After all, in 2008 I read two books: Beginning ASP.NET 3.5 in C# 2008: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition by Matthew MacDonald, and "CLR via C#. Programming on the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 platform in the C# language" by Jeffrey Richter. I read them mainly to get a job, since I somehow scraped together a diploma project on ASP.NET, having gotten through a third of the first book. In the end I didn't get the job and started arriving at the conclusion above. I wasn't aiming at a specific tool, and read "Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction" by Steve McConnell — I understood most of the book, though there were tough spots. I recommended it to two classmates who wanted to become better programmers; they couldn't manage to get through it or understand it…

After that I did several diploma projects and just a scientific program in C#, but none of these projects can be called personal — the idea wasn't mine, after all. On the other hand, for my studies I learned a bit of the basics of PHP, and people started asking me for advice on it, even though I didn't go beyond the lab course. When a real prospect of getting a job appeared, I took up reading the book PHP and MySQL Web Development (4th Edition) by Luke Welling, Laura Thomson, and once I'd already gotten the job at "Info-Region" and knowledge of Joomla was required, I quickly read the beginner's book "Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5" by Hagen Graf, which was enough, together with my search-engine skills, to quickly build a site. I also read a bit of Mastering Joomla! 1.5 Extension and Framework Development by James Kennard and picked up something new.

Then I saw how a programmer who hadn't read these books makes sites with Joomla! Parts of the site are made without using add-ons written by others, but simply by quickly writing your own and rewriting ready-made parts of the code that would have been cleaner to leave alone and just change a few settings. The result comes out the same; you can't say right off which is more efficient — both methods have their advantages and disadvantages. My PHP knowledge doesn't let me use the second method to the full, but an understanding of how a CMS works and good search skills let me find and tweak ready-made solutions without substantial changes to the code.

But again, projects at work aren't my own personal projects, and I'm hardly going to talk about them with a spark in my eyes. I need something of my own, and I do have something in mind, for which I need to know PHP better — but it's still better to learn it on the job, rather than the way I tried before; I just need to get started and force myself. I got confirmation of this thought at Mikhail Zavileyskiy's seminar.

That said, I wouldn't mind getting into ASP.NET, WPF… in the future. But, as was said at the seminar, meta-skills are much more valuable. You need a result and something cool of your own, built on some technology, and everything afterward can be learned without problems.