The stigma of being a fresher

My personal thoughts on the topic.

There is a stigma in being a fresher, its the same as being the youngest child in a family, no one values your opinion. This uphill climb is almost like a right of passage where everyone is looking at how much you make in your first job. But, eventually, the industry will recognize and reward the person who is focused to grow professionally and is always willing to relearn so that they don't repeat mistakes. 

Problems with being a fresher in the IT industry.

• No/Little experience - It is obvious that if you don't give someone a chance, they wont be able to gain any experience. Since freshers are inexperienced, you have to think about their ramp up/training period, this is time or money spent by a company. You should understand that the company has to spend money on you before you can become a contributing member. This might be difficult to impossible in small companies.
• Programming Knowledge/Approach taught at College - Engineering curriculum can help you develop a solution oriented approach towards problem solving. Bluntly speaking, at least in India, the "end justifies the means", e.g. you can memorize a solution. Not trying to generalize saying all colleges/students behave this way, but this is certainly how I have seen education in India. The race to find a solution is the MO and you don't really care about holistically understanding how the solution will impact the system as a whole. I believe this is a problem that every budding SD faces during the beginning of their careers. The drive to understand the whole solution and where your piece fits in, according to me is a must have trait of a good SD. The education system trains us to get to a solution, even if we don't understand it completely.

A funny example is from a Civil Engineering class that was assigned to create a water tank. They designed it perfectly, but did not calculate that the tank would be filled with water. Which ultimately led the water tank to collapse.

Possible solutions for the freshers can be: 

• Internship: Although you are given unimportant tasks, but the company analyses how you solve problems.
• More IT Industry focused Computer Software Engineering curriculum. With guest lectures and workshops with SD professionals working in Industry.
• More Software Certifications in CSE curriculum.
• Since Internship is hard to get for all students, they can do a crowd-sourced projects or a Freelance project towards a commercial end.
• 60:40 practical: theoretical approach of education, where the student starts thinking about real world problems.

Most of the above points require the educational institutes to raise their standards and change according to the needs of the times. The colleges cannot shut their proverbial eye to the changing demands of the Industry. If they don't catch up, we could soon see a generation of SD who don't have a bachelors degree but are more razor focused and have more certifications and experience than an Engineering graduate. I also hope IT industry looses the entry pass of an SD being an engineering graduate eventually.

I wrote this post, since I was frustrated seeing people taking example of India-Australia cricket match and asking corporations to give freshers a chance. It almost feels like they are saying that corporations are not willing to give good candidates a chance. In the current job market where there are a lot of job losses, I believe this is a more conducive environment for fresh graduates, since they cost less and work more. 😉

What matters are your skills and how you market them.