The Struggles of New Graduates, big brothers, "onboarding"
Greg Wilson has been posting interesting things about SIGCSE'08, the conference of the Computer Science Education special interest group of the ACM.
The most interesting of the many many posts is one on the struggles of new graduates, relating a presentation given by Andrew Begel who researched what new graduates got up to when they start their jobs as software developers.
I haven't had especiallymuch experience in terms of identifying and working with new graduates - generally the people I've worked well with and hired already had quite a bit of experience before we met. But I love the idea of helping someone navigate that early part of their career.
There are two classes of mistakes that happen.
- The first is that the new graduates need to identify those people that they can confidently interact with and learn the unwritten rules of the environment from, as well as bounce their own ideas off of to get feedback.
- The second is where the environment puts new graduates into situations where they can't rely on their existing skills.
As noted, new grads generally get put onto existing projects which have their own politics and problems - usually that the project is late, is over budget, has been poorly managed, has been poorly documented, and, often, has been poorly developed by people that no longer are on the project (and, often, no longer at the company). Not exactly the smooth introduction to the rewarding career as a software developer...
While they may know the basics of version control, issue management, and so forth, they often have to blindly fight through many unwritten rules that apply to this company and this project. Each person they interact with is going to require different things from them and also hold information that they might require - they're unlikely to have been taught the soft skills necessary to firstly determine clearly what everyone wants from them, and to communicate what they will do and what they need from others.
I'm tending towards thinking that new grads and those new to the sort of environment you're in (say, worked in industry but not academia, or worked in small company in-house development but not large-scale financial services bespoke work) need a "big brother" assigned to them formally to teach them the ropes and through which any feedback on their performance is handled.
This way the new grad has a single person telling them the good and the bad, in a constructive and trusted manner. The new grad knows who to ask for help when they need it - whether it's where something lives or how best to interact with the various personalities in the team.
This still leaves the problem of how to identify and train this "big brother" - but that's a problem to be pondered another time.
Syndicated 2008-03-18 17:23:01 from Cosmic Seriosity Balance