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Testimonial published in 2020. Roles and career details reflect the account at the time it was written.
My name is Danilo Grudzynski. I completed a master’s degree at ATEP about ten years before writing this account. Studying was fascinating, but at one point the need to earn money outweighed my desire to attend classes, so I studied part-time during my final two years. At the time, this was unusual and strongly discouraged, and in my fifth year I faced possible dismissal. The issue was resolved in my favour because I submitted my laboratory assignments on time and, more importantly, did them well.
I was 30 when I wrote this and had worked in IT for more than ten years. The market was growing quickly, with demand consistently exceeding supply, so there were many opportunities. By about 25, I had worked as a programmer, project manager and technical lead. Around five years before writing, I moved into a client-facing role as a technical solutions architect—a position I described as not especially serious.
At the time of this account, I was a Team Lead / Principal Developer. I jokingly called this a symptom of severe title inflation in modern Ukrainian IT, driven by the sector’s service orientation. I worked at ISG, which I did not recommend. Before that, I spent five years as a Software Architect at DataArt, which I did recommend.
Programming is interesting because it is fundamentally about solving problems: recognising abstractions beneath specific business processes and automating solutions in terms of those abstractions. ATEP gave me an invaluable foundation for seeing abstractions in different fields, from theoretical mechanics to modelling dynamic processes with Laplace transforms.
Without that foundation and those skills, I believe the best outcome for a programmer may be to remain a “senior monkey coder”: with few prospects of working on interesting projects or taking responsibility for anything. Skilled salespeople may sell your work at a good margin, but that does not bring you closer to creating something yourself. You remain dependent on the people who can create and control the work. In a round of layoffs—hello, coronavirus!—you are more likely to be cut than they are. And when people complain about “greedy, stupid Ukrainian IT specialists”, you will be the ones they mean.
Good luck and success. I will not say that studying is the only thing you should think about. But when you have access to an education like ATEP’s, it makes little sense not to use it—for a potential career and for a more interesting, full and active life. The knowledge and experience available here—not simply the diploma or completed exam sessions—helped me greatly. I am sure you will not regret the effort.