First Year in Software Industry

Welcome aboard…Mr Saurabh boasted my director Shytam
Thank you, Sir
Lesson no. 1…there is no sir, no madam…I am Shyam,he is Rama(manager)…
Wow!!!! … So I will call my uncles with their names I thought

I was a fresher with Electronics Engineering background whose CV was brimming with most of the VLSI (Very Large Scale integration) related projects. My Knowledge in devices was perfect and specialization was the field of VLSI ….. Training in STMicroelectronics on memory design was like icing on the top of the cake. I am sure there are many guys like me…..unsure of what they can do during there B.Tech ..what they want to do and finally landing to a place where you will not use the specialized knowledge which has been perfected during you formative years.

Next day,I went straight to director

So Shyam, what is the work you are going to assign me?

Good that you are learning the etiquettes fast…apparently our division works on wireless infrastructure and mobile device management soft wares ,which includes server and devices to be managed. And there is no such well defined team. Whole division is a team. Try to learn Server side of it and then move ahead towards devices in future. So Start on Java. I have already seen you as a guy who is not afraid of taking risks!!(So I was under scrutiny from day one) and talking to senior management

But.. I demurred..what is this…there is no fixed group …no hierarchy…and above all no embedded software where I was interested…From VLSI to JAVA was a big change

I hated Java. This was a paradigm shift .From projects in chip designing to making a career in network management and that too using Java…yukk ..like any other fresher,I hated the idea

I am from Ece background Shyam..will this suit me?….. but I will give it a shot

And from that day in history to this day,I have worked on projects which hardly required Java.They required an attitude and aptitude to learn….learn the tools ..learn to write pertinent codes along with coding standards…Attitude to implement ….. acclimate with different teams working on different kind of projects

Here I am going to present my treatise on what I learnt from Industry in past one year. It may help some of the freshers and few seniors who find their work boring and disgusting …Mind it,I am not giving gyan ,it’s kind of self talk.

1)Leave the prejudices in the college---Don’t be prejudiced about the domain where you are going to make the career, unless you have explored about it thougrouly.

2)The software tools which you are going to use must be given high assiduity. Using help or goggle, learning their intricacies always helps. e.g I use MG-soft browser regularly but haven’t seen many guys using it effectively. They could use basic functionality but whenever a tricky situation comes, they fail. Same is the case with CVS(A tool which helps you to put code on a central repository and not on local machine).You can learn every utility of these tools by TRYING out some dummy things and screwing up your system(or if you are luckier than me,you will not).For the developers, the platform(DOS or UNIX) and development tool(s) they use SHOULD be as familiar as their own rooms where they know what thing to look for at exactly which place.Same to testers.

3)Always be ready to learn new programming languages and scripting in no time. I know it’s easy to say but once you break the ice, next time it would be easy. Believe me..I have learnt JSP,Beans and servlets much slower than multithreaded programming in C++, purely because of ordering dependencies. Once you break that, you are through.

4)Don’t be irresolute to ask right questions…who so ever be it .Initially I used to fear from my team lead

What he will think? How he will react? Is this a stupid question? how dumb I am?

Believe me, there are no stupid questions. All you have to do is prepare yourself before asking. Be clear about what you want and even if you are not sure, give some time on it before approaching and you will get it…for sure. Right questions are always appreciated in software industry.
I have heard “If you are a fresher, you can ask question but as soon as you grow up, you cannot”
To me, this is an absolutely fallacious quote. You can ask at any point in time of your carreer..leave your hesitations in bay area and go.

5) Speak for yourself and your work related problems….in front of managers…in meetings or anywhere, whenever required. I have seen guys and girls who are impeccable technically but hesitate to tell the world about the problems they are facing in their work life.

6) Last one is of sheer importance. It’s the attitude towards work which counts at the end of the day. If your work is boring you can try out things to make it interesting. If the work is getting repetitive day by day, do it in a best possible way as if you do your daily activities like watching TV…listening radio….cooking…brooming…exercises earnestly.

e.g.
a)If you are running a script which takes lot of time, between that time, find out the different ways to optimize it or at least think about it. Even if you succeed in decreasing the time by 15 minutes, isn’t it not a motivation to reduce it further by 15 more minutes and hence more interesting think based search again.

b)If you have to do lot of manual entries in a file(Like I did!),try to find out how to automate it. Even if you don’t get succees,the pleasure of finding different things in the process will not let you get bored

You can devise different methods to make your work…but always believe that nothing is junk and even if it is,try to make out something of it…..as they harness electricity from garbage .

My metamorphosis from a hardware guy to a software engineer was not as effortless but the aptitude and attitude have brought me to this stage where I can now go and say..

Hey Shyam, I can do any kind of work in any domain…