Students ask:

Volodymyr Ihorovych, I got into KhNURE, specifically KIU. How do I get into some company as quickly as possible? What year should I start working?

As quickly as possible means, from day one, make a list of companies, write a résumé, and start sending it down the list, asking to carry shells for programmers.

You need to start working in your first year.

Any engineering discipline always leads to a practical result. At the university, practical classes are sharply limited in time. For example, in my course “Programming for Mobile Platforms,” the labs were limited to 16 hours. 4 labs at 4 hours each. For comparison: at work, the estimate for a not-very-complicated mobile project starts at a hundred developer-hours. And that estimate is made on the basis that an experienced developer will be doing it, not a student. Every instructor dreams that students will spend more time on the subject than the curriculum allots. Without practical application of knowledge, any theoretical knowledge evaporates from your head very quickly. Try right now to solve a system of logarithmic equations. You can’t? How come, you learned this in school, didn’t you?

At work, they’ll hold you to real standards for the quality of your knowledge, not the kindergarten stuff they’ll ask of you at the university. And the higher the standards, the more motivation you have to reach them, the cooler a specialist you’ll be.

If someone starts telling you, like, if you start working, there won’t be time left for PE, philosophy, or, God help us, Ukrainian history. Yes, there won’t be. All academic disciplines can’t have the same priority. If the first priority is software engineering, then all the other disciplines naturally get much less attention. And that’s normal; ask any successful person about priorities and they’ll confirm that priorities have to exist, and for success you have to follow them.

Well, and to finish you off, I’ll tell you a little story.

One 13-year-old schoolboy was interested in electronics. For something he was building, he was missing some parts. He found the biggest company in town in the phone book, called its director, and asked for the missing parts. The director gave the schoolboy those parts and invited him to come tighten screws at the factory over the summer. Working at the factory made such an impression on the schoolboy that he later founded his own company, which changed the computer market forever.

Let’s plug in the unknowns. The factory belonged to Hewlett-Packard, the director’s name was Bill Hewlett, the schoolboy was Steve Jobs, and his company — everyone reading these lines knows what that company is called and how it changed the market.

Imagine if, when you were a schoolkid, Elon Musk had invited you to tighten screws at Tesla. How would that have affected you?

There are very many companies in Kharkiv and very many talented programmers and managers.

Not a single student has later told me: “Vova, I regret that I went to work while I was a student.”

In previous installments:

— Students ask why write term papers.
— Students ask about the reality of expulsion.
— Schoolkids ask whether belles-lettres is needed.
— Students ask about choosing a major.
— Students ask about completing a course after the deadline.
— Students ask about choosing a programming language.
— Students ask about turning in a diploma thesis.

Interested in my opinion on any issue of university life? Send your questions to volodymyr.obrizan@gmail.com. Anonymity is guaranteed. Answers will be published as questions come in. You can also ask questions through the anonymous-questions site http://ask.fm/obrizan