Prologue :

If at the end you are thinking that the title is misleading, please stay away or read it at your own risk.

Early stage

Programmer : An organism that turns caffeine into applications.

This can be your state after working for a year as a programmer, if you are one out of the 100,000 graduates, you read it right, 100,000 graduates, coming out every year. But this is not the situation that you always wanted to face. I know what you thought it would be, when you started. I have been through that phase of life, that narrow tunnel where you can say,

‘There is no light on the other side of the tunnel’

Being a student studying Computer Engineering, you know

  • How to create an Alert in a browser
  • Printing a triangle using nested loop
    • Sorting
  • Using an array
  • Inheritance, data hiding and polymorphism.
  • Recursion

And when you score 80% in the finals, you are elated and can stand proud amongst your peers. You go out and search for job thinking that you will rule the world based on the above mentioned understanding and knowledge. Something like this huh?

The reason you do not rule it is because your response when asked to show your achievements is

“I know printing a triangle, sorting, playing with lolipops and arrays etc….”.

Seriously? Printing a triangle? Why in the world do we need to do that?
You know Bubble sort? Man, come on! So, you must also be knowing printing numbers from 1,2,...n-1?

Then you remember what your professors and lecturers said. “Think out of the box”. This is something that you have missed. The reality is neither do you get paid for printing alerts nor for creating funny starry triangles on a black (or colourful) console.

Growth

If you are one who is getting hired because of your strong concepts, you are actually good at something, clear basics and thorough understanding of how to program, then I do not think that you need any advice. But if you are the one who has always needed a push from someone to reach somewhere, then I must say, the initial months in any organisation is super important and they will shape your life.

Improve yourself

Stay focused, work harder, work till late, compete with colleagues, ask questions and research a lot. I recently found a new site called Google which seems to have the answer to almost anything I need to know. Sometimes, I feel Google gives me way too much information but I can’t blame its good intentions.

Stay fit

Of Course hit a gym, go out for movies, date someone, travel to learn about cultures, etc. This will give meaning to your life, as growing, earning those high salary packages, steady bank balance is not the only things that make you happy.

These are the key points that will shape you and will help you to become a better Engineer, as nobody wants to be called a Programmer.