How to get a job at HP: Alkhan Amandyk's experience

Alikhan Amandyk, City — Atlanta, Software Engineer at HP, Instagram, LinkedIn

About Me

I work as a developer at HP and have been on the team for three years and nine months. I am passionate about programming.

My father is also a programmer, and he influenced my choice of profession. I like the IT industry primarily for its automation capabilities. I enjoy creating solutions that simplify work, save time, and automate routine processes.

How I Joined HP

In 2022, I enrolled in a Master’s program in Computer Science. I studied on campus for eight months and then continued my studies online. After completing the on-campus portion, I started looking for a job.

A recruiter reached out to me through the Indeed website. The process consisted of three stages. The first was a short screening with a recruiter who asked about my experience, resume, and the technologies I had worked with. After that, the recruiter determined if I was a good fit for the team that was looking for a developer.

Then, there were two interviews with the team I now work with. Each interview had separate tasks that I had to solve, as well as quite challenging questions. That’s how I joined HP.

Tips for Those Who Want to Work in an International Company

Generally, standard advice works: you need to solve problems on LeetCode and prepare for behavioral questions. However, analytics helped me approach interviews more calmly. On the other side is also a person—a recruiter or interviewer. Their task is to find a suitable specialist and invite them to the team. Therefore, it is important to understand that an interview is not just a test of you as a candidate.

This approach helped me feel more relaxed during interviews.

Another point I realized after several interviews is the importance of hard skills: understanding which technologies you can work with, how well you know System Design, and so on.

But soft skills are no less important: how well you can communicate, work in a team, and interact with people. It’s about what kind of person you are. I think this is even more important than hard skills.

Work Specifics

The project I work on is called HP Cloud Endpoint Manager. It is a comprehensive software suite that allows you to manage a fleet of computers.

If you are an administrator and have thousands of computers, you need to manage them somehow. Imagine a scenario or a policy that will be applied to all these computers. Doing this manually is costly and time-consuming. Our suite allows you to automate this process.

The project has two parts. There is a client part called the agent. The agent is installed on each computer, and all these agents are connected to the central part. Through the interface, you can see a list of devices, set policies, send commands, and install software on the computer fleet.

From the beginning, the complexity was that the project itself is quite old, so the codebase is large with many modules. At first, it was difficult to understand how all the components worked together.

The first challenge is what I call the balance between developers and business. On the business side, there is a need to develop and add functionality to the service. An indirect effect of this process is technical debt: over time, the project becomes less efficient, and the code becomes more complex. Therefore, on the developer side, there is a need to maintain the codebase and optimize existing processes.

The second challenge arose after the project was put into production and the service started acquiring clients. You need to anticipate what the client wants. We have a product manager who decides which features to add and what to fix. But when clients start using the product, they have their own requests. If we manage to implement the feature and deploy it to production, that’s good, but it doesn’t always happen.

The third challenge is the difference in development in Kazakhstan and the USA. In Kazakhstan, the process is generally faster. Here, in the USA, processes are more formalized. We have a separate QA team, cybersecurity checks, and other stages. Thanks to this, we can be confident that the product is safe and users won’t encounter problems.

Regarding professional growth, I started as a developer and am now a senior developer. There is an opportunity to be a more active participant in the project, participate in so-called triage, where there is a list of tasks and you decide which tasks to work on and how to further develop the project.

I have been working in an international team for over three years. Overall, the technologies are the same, so the development process turned out to be similar to what it was in Kazakhstan. We have an international team, and different approaches to work help us.

As for drawbacks, I would note bureaucracy and a more formalized software development lifecycle. First, you develop the code, then create documentation, then QA must give approval. There are moments when you need to quickly push a hotfix. In Kazakhstan, I am used to this happening faster.

Launching production is one of the most memorable moments because development took a very long time.

So I felt a great relief when clients appeared and we received positive feedback. At that moment, I realized that what I was doing was working and was truly useful.

If you had asked me three years ago what is necessary for success in this field, I would have answered differently. Now I think it is important to keep up with the times and stay informed about events in the IT world. If you don’t use LLMs and modern tools like Claude Code, you may fall behind developers who do. So my advice is to understand what is currently relevant.

The second recommendation is to understand what you specifically like. I sometimes notice that people go into IT because it’s cool, trendy, and you can earn a lot of money. But I believe you should go into the field that you like the most.

Even if it’s IT, within IT you also need to understand what suits you more: frontend, mobile, or backend. But at the same time, you shouldn’t be too narrowly specialized. For example, in the USA, the position is called software engineer. An engineer implies that you should find solutions. You might be hired as a backend engineer, but it’s quite possible that you’ll have to add some pipeline, fix something, or do another task.

So you need to be ready to be versatile. The main thing is to understand what you are working with.

About Life Abroad

The specifics of job hunting are such that you won’t be able to find a job first. Because even while being in Kazakhstan, if you reach out to a recruiter in the USA, the first question they will ask is whether you have a work permit. This could be a Green Card, H-1B visa, or another type of permit.

Therefore, the only option here is to move here first, and then look for a job.

If we talk about differences in work approaches and corporate culture, here everything needs to be documented. You need to write documentation, explain what you did and why you did it. This is practiced everywhere, but here the approach is more thorough and the standards are higher.

Also, you need to be ready for the fact that we have a distributed international team in different time zones.

If you plan to move, move with a clear plan: what you want to do and where you want to work. Because immigration is a serious process.

Another important thing is to believe in yourself. In America, there are the same people; ordinary people work here. If you can prove your value and show your professional profile, they can hire you.

The main thing is not to be afraid to try and even make mistakes. I like this culture because here you are given the right to make mistakes. Sometimes in Kazakhstan, if you make a mistake, you start to fear it. In America, this is not the case. Making mistakes is normal.