3

Okay so there are a lot of things that are left by us students as "this would be taught to us on job, why bother now?" So i have many questions regarding this:

- is it a safe mentality? I mean University is teaching me, say a,b,c and the job is supposed to be like writing full letters, than am i stupid to stick to just a,b,c and not learning how to write letters beforehand?

- what is even "taught" on job? This is especially directed towards people in Big firms. I mean i can always blame that small ugly startup who treated me badly and not gave me any resources, but why do i feel its going to be same at every other company?

I guess no one is gonna teach me for 6 months on how to write classes with java, or make a ml engineer out of me when i don't know jack shit about ml.... That's the task for college, right?

I feel that when these companies say they "teach", you they mean how to follow instructions regarding agile meetings, how to survive office politics and how to learn quickly and produce an output quickly. I don't think that if i don't know how MVI works, then they are gonna teach me that, would they?i guess not unless they already have someone knowledgeable in that topic

- what about the things that are not taught in our colleges and we wanna make a career in it? Like say Android. From what i have experienced , choosing a career in a subject that's not taught you in grad school immediately takes away some kind of shield from you, as you are expected to know everything beforehand. So again, the same questions bfrom above

i did learned something from job life tho, and that too twice. Once it was when i first encountered an app sample for mvvm and once when i found out a very specific case of how video player is being used in a manner that handled a lot of bugs.

Why i didn't knew those approaches when i was not in job? Well, the first was a theoretical model whose practical implementation was difficult to find online that time and the second was a thing that i myself gave a lot of hours, yet failed to understand. However when i was in the company , i was partnered with a senior dev who himself had once spent 30 days with the source code to find a similar solution.

So again , both of above things could have been done by me had i spent more time trying to learn those "professional tools" and/or dwelve deeper into the tech. And i did felt pretty guilty not knowing about those...

Comments
  • 5
    Most of what they call "on the job learning" is derived from a combination of mentoring and your own effort. Most of the training you'll receive will be canned and poorly done.

    At the end of the day, this career is constant study for the next 40 years if you want to be successful at it.
  • 2
    Let's break this down a bit.

    - single letter variables are going to ruin your comprehension of what you have written in 6 months time, write your code in a fashion that allows you and others to come back to it later and actually be able to understand it, legacy projects don't go away over night.

    - taught on the job, not much in the sense you will be sat down in a room and taught something by someone.
    you will be exposed to new ways of doing things through team mates, existing projects and self learning to conquer the next task at hand.

    You may be able to get training through the company though, where they send you on a boot camp or similar to jump start you into a new field the company is heading down, hell some will even pay your tuition for that degree.

    - agile is different in every company, although most of the "ceremonies" are the same, aka: stand ups, reviews, sprint planning ect, just go with the flow and it's not that big of a deal.

    - there's a giant list of things you won't be taught, you must obtain this knowledge yourself, take for example Android development, unless you go out of your way to learn it, how else will you obtain that knowledge?
    Your uni course is just there to get your to think programmatically and be able to assess and understand problems with code.

    - this industry isn't a learn once and master everything, it's a path of self education and exposure to niche areas of development. which paths and projects you work on will only increase your level of knowledge and help you evolve as a dev, and if that's not the case you're stuck in a rut and it's probably time to change who you work for.
  • 0
    you always motivate me, @SortOfTested. thankyou. Its just too different than what we have always seen. I haven't even started on my job life but i know, this is going to be difficult and hard
  • 0
    @C0D4 haha your comment is like that zac sweeers' salary challange on twitter, thanks for the insights . I hated that challange, but it gave a perception of what big firms are giving to their employees.

    I guess i could expect a company to teach me or enroll me in some bootcamp. And i am not sure if i would like it then, because they would be again enrolling me in a "learn the basics of x" boot camp and then expecting me to write a full blown code. But again,what else they could do,that's already good enough and those ugly startups were not giving me even this much.

    I might like that , i may not . Idk. Its just that i have given 3 years to reach at a level of expertise that am currently at, and those 3 years involved a lot of fun, relax and other activities alongside learning. I am not sure a 1 week intensive program would be enough to make me a master.

    I just fear a company's pace that it expects from me in learning & execution, that's why i wanted to know how these trainings work
  • 2
    @StopWastingTime 3 years isn't a whole lot though, for you it sounds like it, for others that was a life time ago.

    You won't master something in a week, you may not even build a project / feature in a week. But that's a week of guided knowledge you didn't have before.
    Those bootcamps or training courses aren't designed for you to come out the other end as an expert, their designed to see if the product is suited for your projects, current or future - it's a way to grab your interest and funnel you down into that area further if it's suitable, but it still relies on you taking that initiative and diving deeper yourself.

    15 years ago I was messing around with basic static websites when IE5, dhtml and css1 was a new thing, and then came MySpace.
    Today I maintain several e-commerce websites, CRMs and internal software for 1 company.

    Your path is only just beginning, strap in and look back in 5-10 years time and actually see how far you've gone.

    And... this bits important if you made it this far: if you're not learning new things, you're not progressing as a dev.
Add Comment