Traditions of the Trade of in the IT industry

With the final year of engineering already commenced, a job in the IT industry is very much on the horizon for the many of you pursuing placements. The realizaon that we’ll soon be out of our well protected college environment and fighng it out on our own in the industry can elicit feelings of both excitement as well as apprehension. As someone who’s only recently made this transion, I’ll try and provide my two cents on your much awaited adventure, hoping to quell some of the anxiety while trying not to dampen any excitement.

So what are we precisely talking about today?
As I’ve already provided an inkling, we’re going to talk about what to expect and what not to as a freshman in the IT industry. Be warned though, this is by no means a comprehensive guide on the topic rather a small musing I could conjure when asked to share my experience in a brief arcle.

Ha! You are a programmer, so you’re going to talk about programming?
Exactly, nice guess Sherlock! There’s not a radical difference between programming in college and programming on the job. Somemes, it feels like you’re sll sing in your college lab performing one of your pracces. The major difference is in the appreciaon of concepts, you understood in college, but had second thoughts about their praccal applicaon. An enterprise level code stack is the best embodiment of Object Oriented Programming (OOP) concepts like Abstracon, Polymorphism, and Inheritance to name a few. While programming in college meant accomplishing a task by hook or by crook, assignments on job require you to do the same while paying due consideraon to the soware resources like memory and me which are no longer infinite. So striving for the most efficient way to do a task, would always be appreciated in the industry.

That’s nice for starters. What else should I be looking out for?
Every task you take up, make sure you know and learn as much as possible about it. As long as you deliver what is asked for, hardly anyone will bother about the level of understanding with which you carried the job out. Make sure you’re the one who bothers about it. Responsibility and accountability are further qualies which will stand you in good stead irrespecve of the profile of your job. Remember your doing well and be accountable about the development and fixes you’ve been responsible for. Managers love nothing more than an employee assuming responsibility of his task and them not having to intervene and bother about it.

Is there more yet?
Yup, some final thoughts before we call it a day with a small discussion on one of the tools we use in the industry. Once you’ve seled into the job and grown familiar with the code base and the ways of working, it’s really easy to stagnate. Be sure you’re always learning something new, taking away something from every task/project you’re assigned. Not ignoring that convoluted piece of code which involves funcon pointers and macros for example. As I already menoned, the onus is on you to keep developing, keep progressing, keep gaining knowledge. Don’t stay in your cocoons, safe and dy in your comfort zones. Move out, interact with other people; people from other departments. Use lunch me chats get a sense of what’s happening in the company. Catch hold of that sales guy, see what the customer support guys are upto, observe what funcon do everyone carry out and where do they fit in this big machine, i.e. your company. Wow, that’s probably a bit more advice than I bargained for. I guess we can finish off with that tool you menoned some way back?

Well, I guess it turned out a bit more long winded than what I hoped for. Anyways, moving on to the tool. I was actually asked to discuss any technology we employ in the industry. Now, given that I work in the Networking domain, I’m well disposed to discuss one of the networking technologies. But I won’t, since it obviously won’t be pernent to the majority of you guys who won’t be doing anything related to networks. Instead I’ll briefly make a point or two about a tool which all code based companies use. Cung the long story short, I am talking about the Versioning system, more specifically Git. Companies use versioning systems for a vast variety of reasons. It helps them keep track of changes being made to the overall code base and the people who make those changes (something we call ‘blame’ in Git.) It helps employees to keep a track of changes they’ve made and the files containing those changes. Enables easy reversal of changes in case they’re now longer required or worse, they’ve broken some other funconality. Git and CVS are the most commonly used versioning systems out there in the market. I’d sincerely advise you guys to use one of them, preferably Git, to maintain your final year project code. You’ll realize it’s much more dier than emailing updated files to each other and is worth the inial hassle of installaon and learning the ways of the system.

That’s that then. Hope this lile discussion was worth your me and helped ease some anxiety as I promised.

All the best for your future endeavors.