Sometimes freshers come with ambitions of, as Jigar says, “writing an entire operating system” right from day one, but have to be confronted with ground reality of doing something less ambitous like reading up some documents. Sometimes a manager may be a bit pissed with them if they seem to be a bit too overambitious and ask “too many” arcane questions right from the very first day.
Its really a good thing that they have so much of energy and enthusiasm, that must be redirected with compassion into doing something useful, rather than suppressing and killing their spirit the conventional corporate way. What we see in the software industry is total selfishness – nobody really cares for anyone else’s welfare. The fact is its not just selfishess, its in a way also plain stupidity – because by caring and actually supporting someone else’s personal growth, a person indirectly ends up benefitting oneself as well. But when people are too obsessed with instant short term results, this point takes a while to sink in – and in most cases it never sinks in. However there are a few rare exceptions here and there (and sometimes even I try to remember to be one of them 😉 )
It may be a while before freshers are assigned any serious project work, but till then one can hope to provide them with some sense of direction till then. For me, its kind of what Nipun would say – paying forward instead of paying back. This is what Romil had provided to us (Jigar, Jaimini and me) when we’d done our final year engineering project – something that helped in forming a pretty good foundation for our more or less succesful careers.
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Some of them are supposed to have gone through some kind of a training programme but I personally am not really convinced about its effectiveness. Training programmes are far too generic and impersonal, and also once its over, especially in a large organisation, they’re like small fish who get lost in the sea and have to find their own way around.
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