Quite clearly, the freshers have to put up with a lot of stuff and they have a shelf-live too, they tend to wear-out too. Almost every single newbie goes through different phases in his/her tenure as a fresher. So, the different phases, as I see it, explained.
Phase 1: I need to get to the top of the world.
July-August is that time of the year when most of the office is on the watch out for some fresh blood to be induced into an otherwise irksome environment. Ah! Those freshers. What with the enthusiasm soaring sky high, a great zeal to take on the world, the charm, the eagerness to hit the top of the world, suddenly most of the office starts to revolve around them. The energy quotient is so high, that the work picks up pace, the social events are so much more fun. (Although it mostly has to do with the changing behavioral pattern of the seniors around, good for the organization though. See "The Fresher Syndrome: Part 2"). The 'Gen-Y' factor these people bring along makes a significant difference, so much as to change the dressing sense of certain few around. You'd find the freshers hanging around together during the tea intervals and breaking for lunch together and think of those old times when you were once a fresher, the impact they bring about is such that you can actually feel yourself egging to go to office as soon as you're out of the bed every morning. Phase 1 of a fresher is filled with energy, creamed with optimism and laced with the 'Gen-Y' factor. Unfortunately, like most good things, this one comes to an end too.Phase 2: The work pressure is killing me.
Phase 2 is when the mind games begin. Things slowly seem to get hazy. "Hang on; this is not exactly what I thought it'd turn out to be", "I don't see things under my control any more", "Is it just me or does everyone in the group feel the same". If you're loaded with work, you'd say "I've been asked to do too much", else you'd say "My friends seem busy. I'm the one who's free. Has the team lost the confidence in me?", "Why do I get to look after the over nightly builds while he gets to work on some real-time development". Suddenly, the chirpiness is missing, the tea breaks are curtailed and the heads are bogged down. "This one in my group is doing very well at work, I need to catch up". You'd find most of them having frequent BMDs (Bad Mood Days). The smiles are no longer to be seen. The social events are not fun anymore. "What would my team members think of me if they watched me dance like a goon". Quite clearly, the 'Gen-Y' factor is waning away.Phase 3: Well, what do you know, I don't care.
Phase 3, as I'd like to put it, is the last phase a fresher ends up in and remains in for the rest of his/her tenure as a software engineer. It is what I'd like to call the 'Accepting' phase. "May be this is how it is supposed to be", "Let me ride along the tide and not against it", "Things are not under my control. So, I need to accept the situations as they are", "My friends seem to be busy with their work. Lucky me! I'm free!", "Poor chap. He gets to do some real-time development. And I've got just the over nightly builds to look after. So relaxing", "I've got work to do today. Let me finish it", "I've got nothing to do today. Let me enjoy", "So what if I get embarrassed on the dance floor. I don't want to be the football of others' opinion. I'll get my team members to dance along with me". If you find yourselves saying stuff like these, my lads, welcome to brotherhood/sisterhood of real software engineers and let us all wait for the next set of freshers to join us.I remember this one incident between my immediate junior and my senior back in 2006. Let's just name the junior "Jr" and the senior, "Sr". On the way back home Sr got some time to talk to Jr, ask him a few questions. Here's the conversation, as re-iterated to me by Sr. Sr, by the way, happened to be my mentor. Watch how Jr goes through the phases within a matter of 20 minutes.
Sr: "Hey Naveen, I got to speak to Jr yesterday on the way back home".
Me: "Good good, what did you guys talk about?"
Sr: "I just asked him a few questions. He gave me the answers. And then I started to prick the bubbles"
Me: "Enlighten me".
Sr: "So Jr, what is kind of stuff you'd like to do here in Symbian".
Jr: "Well, I'd like to build mobile applications, you know, the ones that would really make a difference". (Jr, clearly in phase 1)
Sr: "Really?" (By now, the devil within Sr is warming up)
Jr: "Yes, you're from the PIM team. You must be getting loads of interesting stuff to do"
Sr: "Well actually, I kinda pity you. As a fresher, you'd probably get to work only on some system-wide projects, or the over nightly builds." (Mind games begin as Jr enters Phase 2)
Sr: "If you're lucky, you might get to work on some propagated defects, and if you're really lucky, then you might get to work on some customer incidents".
Sr: "But, getting to work on projects, well, that is kinda asking way too much" (Sr, full of sadistic pleasure)
Jr: "Hmm... well... okay" (I'm in trouble)
1 month later...
Jr quit Symbian and moved to Oracle.
Symbianites from 2006 pass-outs, you know who Jr is, don't you? Well, he wasn't patient enough to wait for phase 3. By the way, Sr is now in UK, busy exploring and clicking snaps and sharing it across to us. I'll leave it up to you to figure out who Sr is. And Sr, good job, and I'm happy you didn't try this trick on me, not that it'd have worked anyway.
First of all, hearty congratulations on very nice trilogy of posts to enter to the blogosphere! You have observed the industry closely and put down your thoughts well.
ReplyDeleteWhat I personally feel is an individual cannot be just classified into these three or four categories based on how they conduct themselves at the workplace. For all that we know, a person who is considered as very serious and minding his/her own business at work would be the one big party animal outside the workplace. Also, someone who is considered quiet and reserved at workplace might be the one who is the most outgoing and friendly outside office.
A lot of things influence freshers as they come into the industry - some might have clear goals that within one year they must be promoted to the next grade and start working seriously towards it from day one; some might have come in just to gain work experience and quit to the next better paying job as soon as possible; some will still be missing the good old days of college life and their friends so much that they would feel left out in alien land. Based on what they have in mind, they try to fit into the categories as you have mentioned.
For example let me take the example of one fresher - person X. Though by nature he belongs to category four - the coolest of them all, he would morph himself into category one because he feels lonely and miserable. There could so many reasons for it - long travel hours, missing close friends from college,etc. But once he gets adjusted to work and finds a big group of friends over the months, he will be slowly back to his original cool self. I have seen so many people like this in our office.
Thus, a fresher is a mixture of all the categories at one or the other point of time. There may be some stereotypes who will be the same always. But atleast the ones I have observed seem to be a mixture of all the categories.