You can learn to program and not become a programmer, but instead apply your new skill to advance your current career
Sergey, a Moscow resident, shared his success story with CodeGym students. He used the course to study for 3.5 years, but still isn't working as a developer. What went wrong? Or perhaps everything turned out as well as possible?
Background: sales specialist
Sergey has been working in sales since 2006: mortgages, car loans, banking products. Then in 2011, he began handling investment products exclusively. Even before attending university, he had decided what he wanted to do: "Work with successful people." And that is just what happened: 6 years after graduating from university, he is a VIP Account Manager at the largest private Russian bank.
Over time, I began to chew on just one question: "What's the next goal?" The answer couldn't be found Of course, there were prospects: department manager, assistant branch manager, or branch manager, but something always got in the way.
When Sergey began working for an investment company, one of his tasks was to attract new clients. What options are there? Cold calls, conferences, old clients, their acquaintances. He specialized in bonds and put together portfolios. He ran into a problem: there was no good free source of information on Eurobonds and their main indicators: maturities, coupons, yields; there were no reviews, no news, and no picks. There were only two relevant information sources: one paid, the second unreliable. This is how Sergey realized that he wanted to create his own resource.
Getting to know IT and developing the first project
Sergey started exploring options for how to bring the project to life and came across WordPress. First, I had to play around with bond indicators, bond issues, and bond ratings. He found the data on a German stock exchange. At first, I updated everything manually, but after two weeks I figured out on my own how to make auto-updates work.
He wrote reviews and news almost daily, and studied at the same time. Six months later, without advertising or SEO, the website entered Yandex's top three search results for the query "Eurobond prices" and Google's top five for the same query.
When everyone in Sergey's office was obsessed with learning English, he also decided to learn another international language, which, he believed, would bring him practical benefits. He chose Java on the spur of the moment, and only later found out that it is one of the most popular languages.
For a whole month he studied in an improvised manner, pulling snatches of information from videos and articles, without a clear plan. He had not yet discovered CodeGym.
Learning on CodeGym and the initial earnings from an Android app
Sergey spent 1-2 hours studying nearly every evening. He no longer remembers what level he reached, but after 3 months on the course he decided to put his new knowledge into practice.
As it happened, his employer tasked him with becoming certified as a financial advisor, which would require him to pass two exams with a total of 3300 questions and problems. The only way to prepare was a PDF scan of a 300-page document. Reading it on a computer was impractical, reading it on your phone was all but impossible, and there was no ability to search.
To make the preparation process better, Sergey converted the file into a readable format and decided to make a small Android app for practicing for the test. This is how a small personal project gradually grew into a full-fledged app on Google Play — with search, chat, a real exam emulator, and an updated design.
After some time, demand for the exam increased significantly. Because the app was a paid app, Sergey received 25,000-30,000 rubles a month from sales, so he decided to create an iOS version.
New projects
In parallel with his studies and app development, Sergey learned about Spring and decided to implement a long-standing idea related to stock trading: a dashboard for analyzing his trading system.
In the meantime, shift work was introduced at the office, and Sergey was made responsible for schedules and records After two weeks in a routine, he decided to write a Telegram bot so employees could set their own shifts and change shift dates, as needed. The bot would also remind employees of their shifts.
He made another bot for himself: this one maintained client portfolios. It showed asset price fluctuations and sent a beautiful visual representation of the selected client's portfolio. His coworkers asked to be added, and Sergey shared his useful innovation.
New position
His activities and work-optimizing projects did not go unnoticed: The company's HR department took an interest in Sergey. A huge effort was underway to transform the company into a digital service provider, and Sergey was offered the position of Head of IT Projects. That sounded good even without any subordinates. At that time, 1.5 years had passed since he began to study the "foreign" language.
Intermediate results
Sergei didn't become a developer, but he solves everyday problems with the help of his knowledge of software development. This makes it easier for him to assign tasks to colleagues, estimate how long the work will take, and help do analytics.
He continues to rub shoulders with successful people. And software developers are successful people. After all, they do what they want. Not everyone can make that boast.
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