Sunday, September 17, 2006

Kindergarten Engineers

A week ago, my wife & I visited one of my friend’s home. My friend has a kid who goes to kindergarten. My friend was telling that the next day his kid had his term exam. I was observing the kid for sometime and I observed no sense of tense or no seriousness of the exam. The kid was busy playing and enjoying himself with out a trace of exam fever in his deeds. Whereas his mom & dad highlighted a numerous times during their conversation with me about the kid’s exam and they sounded real nervous about it.
Suddenly an analogy struck me.

Back at my work place I have many fresh out of college people in my team. Having those kids in the team keeps the work place very lively with all the fun, as if having kids around. I have observed that most of the freshers would not have the seriousness of project delivery deadlines while me and my team leads are pretty worried about meeting the deadlines & meeting the quality etc. When retrospected my good old ‘fresher’ days I realized that I was no exception.

Now it’s my turn to worry and be serious on behalf of them (as someone else did on behalf of me). However, I am sadistically happy that soon they would grow up to realize the seriousness of the environment they are associated with. Some cycle that!

17 comments:

Anonymous said...

When youy talk about priority, I agree with you. But when it comes to commitment, I feel freshers have more commitment than others do.Same analogy , watch a kid when it's involved in some activity..the level of commitment is uncomparable.

Baranidharan said...

Level of seriousness and commitment is less in freshers. I am stating only in the aspect of the project work. At present the major problem we face is having the work done with out any slippage. Abundance in job oppurtunities may be one of the reason for the reluctantness of the Freshers. When you lose your priority you also lose the focus and commitment required for a critical job.

Anonymous said...

I see it the other way. When it comes to fresher, they have the thrust to acheive things and prove themselves. They want to show their full capability. They have no other commitment in life like family , spouse, kids etcs. They spend a lot of time learning new things and impressing others.
I have learnt Eclipse from a fresher only.
I do worry a lot "when I work towards deliverable and a fresher calls the team for a session on ECLIPSE usage" . To a fresher, if his module work is done , he is happy. As a leader, I worry about the deliverable only. I see a difference in priorities only. I feel it should be that way only...
As a experienced person, I am there to worry about deliverables.

As a experienced person, I feel I lack the passion of acheiving or innovating new things

Baranidharan said...

We are conveying the same thoughts with different perspective. We both agree freshers lack priority. I accept that the fresher now are well talented when I compare them to myself when I was a fresher. With out proper prioritization project will be stake even with good talented team. On the day of delivery if an associate is more involved in a training, this shows the lack of interest on the project work. I will doubt the quality of the module he worked on. I have a team of talented young men in my team, but I face the quality issues in the deliverables, because when it comes to project work it is least priority. It becomes the responsibility of experience people like us to have them focussed else their talent will be "Vizhallukku Iraitha Neer"

Anonymous said...

I went through ur blog and enjoyed reading. Lots of good info.

bye
raju

Anonymous said...

Yeah.. I wish I could rewind at least 2 years in my life..

Seenivasan said...

Hey Nithya, I thought still you are a 'kid'. :)

Anonymous said...

I admit that we experienced persons should see that there is no compromise in the schedule/quality of the final deliverable. My point here is about priority and only priority . And in that sense , there is nothing to blame him.
As already said, he looks after his module and not the entire deliverable. If his module is done he is happy and that's what he wants.

Years ago, I was playful. I never worried about deliverable. But I was appreciated for even a trivial job. my morale was increased. I loved my job.

Blaming a fresher for quality/schedule,etcs .. definitely reduces their morale to work under you.

Priorities differ from year to year and there is nothing here to blame a fresher for his priorities.

Seenivasan said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Baranidharan said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Baranidharan said...

My point of argument is being diverted. My expectation is simple. An associate has to complete work on their module on time and deliver with quality. I don't want them to worry about the other modules in the project. My concern was that they were unable to do that, this was happenining across projects. They are very talented young man there is no doubt about that, but they are not using it in deliverables because of other priorities. I don't think that every one should learn from their mistakes, they should learn from others or seniors should teach them. Company does not run a school so that everyone learn at their leisure.

PS: That was a good conversation indeed. I am stopping this conversation from my end. :-)

Anonymous said...

Had similar discussion at office in the recent past. So couldn't restrain myself from commenting on it.
No offense Baranidharan.


Good blog . Keep it up !

Seenivasan said...

that was a very good discussion.

thanks Aravinth & Barani.

Anonymous said...

Sorry for peeping at the END !

If everyone is having the maturity level of CEO, then what will CEO do?

Its Leader who brings the level of maturity to these kids.

If all freshers in your team is irresponsible, then it is leaders job to correct the same. Always 1 or 2 exceptions will be there in the team, so as a leader you dont have to worry too much about that exceptions.

Seenivasan said...

We are not running a kindergarten to spoonfeed everyone. I accept that the responsibility of training the people for the job lies with the senior folks. But if a person is irresponsible and not showing seriousness continuously it would make the life (of the senior folk) miserable. I have been thru. You also can not deny that.

Anonymous said...

if a person is irresponsible and not showing seriousness, well those all considered to be exceptions and somtimes it is absurd to correct that kid, so leave it, he gets accordingly for the level of seriousness.

There are ways to deal with such kind of exception people, you know what to do with that kind of people :)-

Seenivasan said...

I want to sack such people. But I couldn't really do that.