The last time I left you off with the slight impression that my dreams about university being the place where I’d get to write quality code and learn how to develop actual applications and boost my career start wasn’t really as expected. That is entirely correct. In fact, at the time of this writing I’m in my 8th, and final, semester of university and I still have the strong belief that we we’re taught a load of crap. But even though the introduction has mentioned most of it, I’ll go through the process of explaining it all more in-depth.
The first semester of university was a mix between learning what I had already been taught in high-school, which is functional programming, and learning some basics of hardware programming. I can say the hardware programming part was quite fun as we had a great teacher. Apart from one professor here and there who utterly sucked at their own curricula, I must admit I liked the first semester, this was however sheer luck as I would soon find out most of the professor I would have in the future would be in the lower-end of the food chain. By the time I reached my third semester we had began studying OOP in Java, as well as deepening our C/C++ knowledge. Some of my colleagues have started getting jobs at different companies and I was getting the feeling that this was what I was supposed to do as well. Not lingering much longer, I send my resume to a couple of companies hoping to get a job and start chipping in some money for myself. I had gotten two interviews. One was at a big corporate companies that we’re designing software for german cars like BMW, Porsche, VW and so on. The interview consisted of a technical side where a lady asked me a couple of OOP questions like ‘What’s an abstract class in Java?’ and ‘What’s a constructor?’. Later on I would find out these sort of questions are not a joke, but an actual technical interview at corporate companies, the sort of which I had learned to avoid. Following this was a language interview where a lady started talking german to me to see if I can speak he language fluently (which I nailed since I had studied 8 grades with german as mother-tongue). They sent me home quickly with a promise that I would be getting a feedback on my interview as soon as possible. This of course never happened. The other interview was at a small company who we’re developing in Ruby on Rails. I had no prior knowledge on Rails so I went there blindfolded. The interview here consisted of a test (around 1h) of logical questions with a small code task at the end. We we’re 7 people total at the interview, the others we’re older than me so I can safely say I had the disadvantage of not knowing as much stuff as they did. Nevertheless, the others got sent home immediately afterwards, while I was called in to speak with a developer for another interview. We sat on a couch for about 15 minutes and spoke about what my intentions were and what I had done so far programming-wise. The reply came a few weeks afterwards stating they had thoroughly analysed my case and decided I wouldn’t have enough experience and that if I should decide to still need a job in a few years, we should keep in touch. This also never happened.
Fast forward a bit more, after the fourth semester I went abroad in Denmark for 6 weeks of summer school. This is something that my mom insisted for me to do and it turned out to be a wise decision indeed. I had opted for two courses: a 4 week course on web development and a 2 week course on developing Android apps. The best experience I got in summer school was meeting a bunch of cool people and seeing the differences between people with different nationalities. Nevertheless, let’s keep it professional. The web development course was taught by two guys which together had a web development company. One was a dev, the other a designer. The fact that this was 2012 and I was taught how to develop web apps using Microsoft Visual Studio and Flash was not a surprise for me at the time. Looking back I can see that they we’re old-school (should’ve been hinted by the fact that they we’re using IE as their default browser, before IE got big improvements). The Android course was taught by a young fellow who was CEO at a mobile app development company. I can say he was a pretty cool guy and we definitely learned a lot of stuff over the course of 2 weeks.
Around the ending of the fifth semester I had already known more programming languages like LISP, PHP, HTML ,CSS, ML, Haskell, Prolog, Assembly and I decided I’d take another shot at joining the company. Most of my colleagues already got a job by this time (I believe we we’re ~150 and around ~100 we’re employed). I was hinted that the company that we’re doing IT Consulting for Porsche we’re coming to my city so I decided to send them a resume. They replied shortly stating that a resume in English wasn’t enough and that I should send one in German, and a recommendation letter as well. I quickly translated my resume and got a recommendation letter from one of my professors in Denmark and sent them over. After a few talks over e-mails I was invited for an interview at their HQ. Here I saw a different kind of interview. Rather then being asked questions about what I know and what my plans for the future are, they presented my with what they had to offer for me to join the company. Soon afterwards I was given a task which consisted in some theoretical questions about SAP and a small practical task of writing some Java code. I had two weeks to accomplish this. Two days later I had finished it and sent it over. The reply never came back. I had sent 3 e-mails over the course of the next few months asking what is happening and until today they had never replied but they still send me e-mails wishing me happy birthday every year.
In the summer of 2014 we had to do 6 weeks worth of work at a company as a school assignment. I applied to numerous companies and got a few interviews but I only attended two of those. One was at the company I was back in 2012 (the one making car software, the one that never replied me with my interview feedback). I was scheduled for an interview about my resume and then another interview consisting of 10 short technical questions soon afterwards. They said yes. However I did not join that company. The other interview was over Skype, with a small company (~8 employees) in another city. The fact that I was to work remote attracted me and I decided to join. They we’re doing web development. And so, my career had started..