I feel like all fresh out of school employees are productivity drains. But the profession doesn’t get experienced employees without hiring inexperienced people and training them, so it’s worth doing a little on-the-job training to make them useful, otherwise you end up in the state you’re describing where you want experienced devs and there aren’t any.
I know how it must sound but it wasn’t like that when I graduated around 2002. 80% of my classmates were self-sufficient and had gained experience and self-esteem through various demanding group projects and their thesis work. Many of them already had more value to offer than the tired self-educated colleagues they met on their first job.
When you have developed and simulated your own ad-hoc wireless routing protocol, implemented distributed two-phase commit algorithms and built your own compiler, you don’t need to ask your colleague fifty times how to use React state. You google it and figure it out. You’re trained to always learn new things and be comfortable with it.
I graduated in that rough time period and also felt like I was great, but realistically my institution didn’t really prepare me for most of the things you actually do on a software coding team. Sure, we had a course on software engineering and we’d had some demanding solo projects, but most of our coursework was computer science rather than software engineering.
And my first job was actually in a researchy role with small teams and manageable process. Now I don’t think I was an actual drain on company resources, but I definitely recognized that a lot of what I did day to day wasn’t something that I was already well prepared for. Certainly it could have been done much faster by a senior employee though, so any task assigned to my was done so with the knowledge that it would take longer and benefit from some oversight, but that would be worthwhile to grow the company.
I feel like all fresh out of school employees are productivity drains. But the profession doesn’t get experienced employees without hiring inexperienced people and training them, so it’s worth doing a little on-the-job training to make them useful, otherwise you end up in the state you’re describing where you want experienced devs and there aren’t any.
I know how it must sound but it wasn’t like that when I graduated around 2002. 80% of my classmates were self-sufficient and had gained experience and self-esteem through various demanding group projects and their thesis work. Many of them already had more value to offer than the tired self-educated colleagues they met on their first job.
When you have developed and simulated your own ad-hoc wireless routing protocol, implemented distributed two-phase commit algorithms and built your own compiler, you don’t need to ask your colleague fifty times how to use React state. You google it and figure it out. You’re trained to always learn new things and be comfortable with it.
I graduated in that rough time period and also felt like I was great, but realistically my institution didn’t really prepare me for most of the things you actually do on a software coding team. Sure, we had a course on software engineering and we’d had some demanding solo projects, but most of our coursework was computer science rather than software engineering.
And my first job was actually in a researchy role with small teams and manageable process. Now I don’t think I was an actual drain on company resources, but I definitely recognized that a lot of what I did day to day wasn’t something that I was already well prepared for. Certainly it could have been done much faster by a senior employee though, so any task assigned to my was done so with the knowledge that it would take longer and benefit from some oversight, but that would be worthwhile to grow the company.