Give the youth
About a year ago we interviewed interns from the Mainframe Quality Engineers team and learned about the students' point of view on combining work and study and the secrets of a successful career start .
Now we want to share the opinion of those who ventured to invite young graduates to teams that develop EMC products.
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The main reason why people hire students and graduates is the shortage in the market of suitable personnel with the necessary skills and knowledge. For example, when the subject area is very narrow, such as programming in assembler under z / OS. Personal qualities are also important: a person must be sensible, be able to clearly express thoughts, responsibly perform assigned tasks, work in a team and balance wage requirements with their knowledge and skills. And if you can not find a suitable specialist that meets the necessary criteria, you should take a graduate or a student and “shape” an employee of a dream out of him. In short, if you can not find the ideal - create it yourself!
But this approach has its own characteristics that must be considered. Educating a young employee can take a lot of time. It is strongly influenced by the approaches and vision of the older comrades, with all their advantages and disadvantages. And the main question of successful training, do you have a worthy professional tutor? Can he state his thoughts clearly for students? Does he have time for this? A typical mistake is to give a student to a weak mentor, since all the strong ones are loaded with work. After all, the rate of professional growth directly depends on the level of the role model.
At the same time, one cannot ignore the possibility of one’s own error when one is hiring a less promising candidate. At one time, our team faced this: the campaign to recruit students was not given due attention, and as a result, the applicant was practically one. His training required a lot of effort, and only when we took another student, it turned out that other young employees could learn faster, literally grasping everything on the fly. Therefore, you need to be very careful in selecting candidates, because this stage determines how quickly a person joins the team, starts to give decent results and how soon he will grow into a professional of the highest level. Also, with due diligence and attention, it is possible to train the not very talented student with high quality, and perhaps his talents will simply be revealed a little later.
Taking into account this experience, we have built a solid system of selection through student projects (you can learn about the joint student projects of the EMC Development Center and technical colleges from the speech of Mikhail Salamatov at the SECR-2015 conference ). I want to say with confidence that students can solve complex problems. This is evidenced by the history of many large companies that have grown out of successful youth start-ups.
It should be remembered about the influence of current traditions and habits - the collective behavior patterns - on the employee's potential. The fact is that sometimes students can solve problems faster and more qualitatively than was previously thought possible. This is especially good when they do not know that the task is difficult. For example, if work can be done in a day, and everyone around you says that such things are usually done a week, the young employee will definitely solve the problem for a whole week. Therefore, the worst thing you can do is set the task for the student, saying that it is difficult and you do not expect quick results. Or give the task a lot of time, based on how much your specialist spends on its solution. If you discover the true potential of a young employee, you will get a chance to build a more effective team.
The successful work of newcomers also stimulates the rest of the team. After all, the older a person is, the less he has left the desire to learn something new. Therefore, old-timers will use proven methods over the years, even if there are more effective solutions. And students are young blood, an effective way to take the group out of stagnation and open new horizons. However, the success of young people can cause tension in the team. Students can get zaznatsya at first success, and question the experience of others. And it is sometimes difficult for experienced colleagues to admit that someone young has found a more optimal solution. All this will lead to undermining teamwork and a general decrease in productivity.
What are “teamwork” and “team spirit”? For me, this is not a silent sitting behind the monitors, when the desire to run home at 18-00 is in the air. The ideal team is a group of enthusiasts who actively interact with each other, arguing how to do something better and more correctly, sometimes forgetting about time. Due to their young age, students are full of optimism and youthful maximalism. And it infects the rest. So if your team loses the energy and spirit of innovation - it's time to hire the young. And in order for life to boil further, you will have to invest more time and effort in various team-building and collective events.
What else can you say about young employees? They are much harder for the team, the common cause and the company. On the one hand, they still have nothing to compare with, on the other hand, it wants to believe that they immediately got into the best company. And if you maintain this positive attitude, young people will not begin to think about finding work in other places.
In addition to the mood of the students, there are expectations that can often be far from reality. Raised on Hollywood films, some newcomers believe that their careers should take off at lightning speed. In this regard, it is difficult for them to focus on current tasks, they say, "anyway in six months I will do something more great." Often, they are still fans of different newfangled trends. So get ready to fight a variety of “ideal pictures of the world” imposed by the Internet and books: is your office multicolored enough to create an atmosphere of creativity? You are using Jenkins and Git? Or maybe you still have not switched to SCRUM? Or SCRUM you have some not real? Why do you not manage in the manner described in the book by the famous management guru? Have you not read it?
Other features that should be taken into account: students continue to learn, so they can sit at lectures exactly when they are needed most. So it is not recommended to take them in support and for other works that require constant presence. There is also a risk that after graduating from university, the student will leave. Perhaps his work with you was good only as a part-time job. Or during the training period the salary was not so important, but now it seems that in another place it will be more satisfying. In addition, young employees can be unexpectedly lost due to army, decree, etc. But do not despair, the students will complete their education sooner or later, and the time and effort invested in them with the right approach will give you feedback for many years to come.
Last year, I decided to use the EMC affiliate program with St. Petersburg universities and attract students to the team. The main goal was to relieve experienced employees from routine tasks and to give full-time engineers the opportunity to be mentors of less experienced programmers.
Interns should not have been too much in relation to the main staff. The team should be able to “digest” them, otherwise there is a risk of a negative impact on projects instead of a positive one. If you are also considering enrolling students, take them only to a stable, well-functioning team, with well-established communication mechanisms.
We approached the selection of candidates so carefully, as if it was necessary to close the senior engineering positions. It was important to understand what questions and how often the future newcomer will ask the specialists, what productivity he is willing to work with, what his motivation is, whether he can work in a team, how he perceives criticism and advice, and much more.
As a result, we were able to choose the best candidates, and last year I took on a team of three interns (ITMO, SPbU). They exceeded my expectations. During the year, each student was offered technically challenging tasks on which they worked under the guidance of mentors. They did an excellent job, according to colleagues, they worked at the level of full-fledged programmers. Subsequently, we offered all three of them to enter the state. Two remained with us to work as engineers, and the third decided to go to a startup in another city.
Thanks to such a positive experience, this year I accepted another intern from St. Petersburg State University, who has already established himself as a serious and productive engineer. Within a few months, we decided to entrust him with the development of a complex UI feature, on which he works under the guidance of the chief architect of the St. Petersburg branch of Captiva.
In my opinion, the adoption of interns in the team - this is a great opportunity to unload the staff. And in case of successful cooperation, interns will be able to join the team with already accomplished and qualified engineers, who have gained experience working on your products, as part of your workflow. And it pays for such inconveniences as the need to adapt to the curriculum, especially during the examination period. Just to this you need to be ready from the very beginning and take into account in the plans.
The peculiarity of working with students (and in general with young specialists who are just starting their career path) is that they have an active period of accumulation of experience and knowledge. Therefore, it is necessary to invent such tasks for them, at the solution of which they will be able to learn something new, without breaking too much firewood. The ideal picture looks like this: the project has a task, for the solution of which it is necessary to conduct some comparative analysis of n possible technological solutions. There is a senior engineer who presents at least some of these solutions, and there is enough time to review them all. Of course, in life all these conditions are not fulfilled at once, and the manager has to show a lot of ingenuity to balance all interests, as well as the burden on senior employees, interns and one's beloved. In this case, interns need to regularly devote time to: talk, listen, ask questions. I deliberately avoid words like “advise”, “instruct”, etc., because the ability to speak and think independently is much more valuable. At least in the development of new products.
Very often there is a temptation to use students in the production process, but as a result everyone loses. There are, of course, happy exceptions, but then you should call it part-time work, not an internship. What is the difference? Interns are future specialists who will develop the industry after us, they must possess all the necessary skills and abilities. And in order to achieve a new stage, they need to master more knowledge than was sufficient at the previous stage. However, it is important to remember that despite the development of technologies and processes, there are certain values ​​that, as a rule, remain unchanged. I think many will disagree with me, but I believe that the internship should make the student a specialist of the future. Specialist for today, he will be if you include it in your project. To be an expert of the past, he is taught in the university. Most students perceive the internship as a continuation of their studies. This is the right approach, and this is how employers should relate to this. And if you create a specialist from the intern of the future, you should set as high a starting point as possible for him, focusing his development on learning more advanced technologies.
Based on this situation, it is obvious that you need to choose smart, capable, and most importantly, motivated students. Having brought the intern to the company, it is necessary to discuss which project he will be working on. Perhaps it will be something related to the production of, say, building a PoC architecture, modeling super-complex structures or interactions. The main thing is that the project should be interesting for both the intern and you. At the same time, you should try to use technologies that nobody owns in the company, including the intern himself. Next, determine the project objectives and plan the work. Here it is important to find a “middle ground” without leaving the intern with the problem one on one, but without overloading it with control lines, risks and Gannta charts. In the course of work, it is necessary to regularly monitor the success of the newcomer, to include mentoring specialists who should be well prepared in advance for such a role. An important role in the learning process is played by regular presentations that the student must conduct first to other interns, then to the specialists in his project, etc. Finally, sooner or later the intern will reach a level where he can independently submit his project to the customer. But many managers do not trust the interns and leave them "behind the scenes", presenting the development on their own. Here it is important not to be led by your concerns, but to provide the intern with the opportunity to talk about her work and directly receive feedback on the product.
This method of working with interns allows you not only to teach a student what you can do yourself, but to develop it as a specialist who will be in demand, will be able to develop independently and help others.
In the comments, we invite readers to share their view on attracting interns and students to work in real projects. :)
Now we want to share the opinion of those who ventured to invite young graduates to teams that develop EMC products.
')
Sergey Pospelov
Head of Mainframe Software Development at EMC
The main reason why people hire students and graduates is the shortage in the market of suitable personnel with the necessary skills and knowledge. For example, when the subject area is very narrow, such as programming in assembler under z / OS. Personal qualities are also important: a person must be sensible, be able to clearly express thoughts, responsibly perform assigned tasks, work in a team and balance wage requirements with their knowledge and skills. And if you can not find a suitable specialist that meets the necessary criteria, you should take a graduate or a student and “shape” an employee of a dream out of him. In short, if you can not find the ideal - create it yourself!
But this approach has its own characteristics that must be considered. Educating a young employee can take a lot of time. It is strongly influenced by the approaches and vision of the older comrades, with all their advantages and disadvantages. And the main question of successful training, do you have a worthy professional tutor? Can he state his thoughts clearly for students? Does he have time for this? A typical mistake is to give a student to a weak mentor, since all the strong ones are loaded with work. After all, the rate of professional growth directly depends on the level of the role model.
At the same time, one cannot ignore the possibility of one’s own error when one is hiring a less promising candidate. At one time, our team faced this: the campaign to recruit students was not given due attention, and as a result, the applicant was practically one. His training required a lot of effort, and only when we took another student, it turned out that other young employees could learn faster, literally grasping everything on the fly. Therefore, you need to be very careful in selecting candidates, because this stage determines how quickly a person joins the team, starts to give decent results and how soon he will grow into a professional of the highest level. Also, with due diligence and attention, it is possible to train the not very talented student with high quality, and perhaps his talents will simply be revealed a little later.
Taking into account this experience, we have built a solid system of selection through student projects (you can learn about the joint student projects of the EMC Development Center and technical colleges from the speech of Mikhail Salamatov at the SECR-2015 conference ). I want to say with confidence that students can solve complex problems. This is evidenced by the history of many large companies that have grown out of successful youth start-ups.
It should be remembered about the influence of current traditions and habits - the collective behavior patterns - on the employee's potential. The fact is that sometimes students can solve problems faster and more qualitatively than was previously thought possible. This is especially good when they do not know that the task is difficult. For example, if work can be done in a day, and everyone around you says that such things are usually done a week, the young employee will definitely solve the problem for a whole week. Therefore, the worst thing you can do is set the task for the student, saying that it is difficult and you do not expect quick results. Or give the task a lot of time, based on how much your specialist spends on its solution. If you discover the true potential of a young employee, you will get a chance to build a more effective team.
The successful work of newcomers also stimulates the rest of the team. After all, the older a person is, the less he has left the desire to learn something new. Therefore, old-timers will use proven methods over the years, even if there are more effective solutions. And students are young blood, an effective way to take the group out of stagnation and open new horizons. However, the success of young people can cause tension in the team. Students can get zaznatsya at first success, and question the experience of others. And it is sometimes difficult for experienced colleagues to admit that someone young has found a more optimal solution. All this will lead to undermining teamwork and a general decrease in productivity.
What are “teamwork” and “team spirit”? For me, this is not a silent sitting behind the monitors, when the desire to run home at 18-00 is in the air. The ideal team is a group of enthusiasts who actively interact with each other, arguing how to do something better and more correctly, sometimes forgetting about time. Due to their young age, students are full of optimism and youthful maximalism. And it infects the rest. So if your team loses the energy and spirit of innovation - it's time to hire the young. And in order for life to boil further, you will have to invest more time and effort in various team-building and collective events.
What else can you say about young employees? They are much harder for the team, the common cause and the company. On the one hand, they still have nothing to compare with, on the other hand, it wants to believe that they immediately got into the best company. And if you maintain this positive attitude, young people will not begin to think about finding work in other places.
In addition to the mood of the students, there are expectations that can often be far from reality. Raised on Hollywood films, some newcomers believe that their careers should take off at lightning speed. In this regard, it is difficult for them to focus on current tasks, they say, "anyway in six months I will do something more great." Often, they are still fans of different newfangled trends. So get ready to fight a variety of “ideal pictures of the world” imposed by the Internet and books: is your office multicolored enough to create an atmosphere of creativity? You are using Jenkins and Git? Or maybe you still have not switched to SCRUM? Or SCRUM you have some not real? Why do you not manage in the manner described in the book by the famous management guru? Have you not read it?
Other features that should be taken into account: students continue to learn, so they can sit at lectures exactly when they are needed most. So it is not recommended to take them in support and for other works that require constant presence. There is also a risk that after graduating from university, the student will leave. Perhaps his work with you was good only as a part-time job. Or during the training period the salary was not so important, but now it seems that in another place it will be more satisfying. In addition, young employees can be unexpectedly lost due to army, decree, etc. But do not despair, the students will complete their education sooner or later, and the time and effort invested in them with the right approach will give you feedback for many years to come.
Alexander Yakovlev
Head of Software Development at EMC Captiva
Last year, I decided to use the EMC affiliate program with St. Petersburg universities and attract students to the team. The main goal was to relieve experienced employees from routine tasks and to give full-time engineers the opportunity to be mentors of less experienced programmers.
Interns should not have been too much in relation to the main staff. The team should be able to “digest” them, otherwise there is a risk of a negative impact on projects instead of a positive one. If you are also considering enrolling students, take them only to a stable, well-functioning team, with well-established communication mechanisms.
We approached the selection of candidates so carefully, as if it was necessary to close the senior engineering positions. It was important to understand what questions and how often the future newcomer will ask the specialists, what productivity he is willing to work with, what his motivation is, whether he can work in a team, how he perceives criticism and advice, and much more.
As a result, we were able to choose the best candidates, and last year I took on a team of three interns (ITMO, SPbU). They exceeded my expectations. During the year, each student was offered technically challenging tasks on which they worked under the guidance of mentors. They did an excellent job, according to colleagues, they worked at the level of full-fledged programmers. Subsequently, we offered all three of them to enter the state. Two remained with us to work as engineers, and the third decided to go to a startup in another city.
Thanks to such a positive experience, this year I accepted another intern from St. Petersburg State University, who has already established himself as a serious and productive engineer. Within a few months, we decided to entrust him with the development of a complex UI feature, on which he works under the guidance of the chief architect of the St. Petersburg branch of Captiva.
In my opinion, the adoption of interns in the team - this is a great opportunity to unload the staff. And in case of successful cooperation, interns will be able to join the team with already accomplished and qualified engineers, who have gained experience working on your products, as part of your workflow. And it pays for such inconveniences as the need to adapt to the curriculum, especially during the examination period. Just to this you need to be ready from the very beginning and take into account in the plans.
Alexey Akopyan
Head of Software Development at EMC EOS2 Cloud Engineering
The peculiarity of working with students (and in general with young specialists who are just starting their career path) is that they have an active period of accumulation of experience and knowledge. Therefore, it is necessary to invent such tasks for them, at the solution of which they will be able to learn something new, without breaking too much firewood. The ideal picture looks like this: the project has a task, for the solution of which it is necessary to conduct some comparative analysis of n possible technological solutions. There is a senior engineer who presents at least some of these solutions, and there is enough time to review them all. Of course, in life all these conditions are not fulfilled at once, and the manager has to show a lot of ingenuity to balance all interests, as well as the burden on senior employees, interns and one's beloved. In this case, interns need to regularly devote time to: talk, listen, ask questions. I deliberately avoid words like “advise”, “instruct”, etc., because the ability to speak and think independently is much more valuable. At least in the development of new products.
Andrey Pakhomov
Head of Development at the EMC Research Center in Skolkovo
Very often there is a temptation to use students in the production process, but as a result everyone loses. There are, of course, happy exceptions, but then you should call it part-time work, not an internship. What is the difference? Interns are future specialists who will develop the industry after us, they must possess all the necessary skills and abilities. And in order to achieve a new stage, they need to master more knowledge than was sufficient at the previous stage. However, it is important to remember that despite the development of technologies and processes, there are certain values ​​that, as a rule, remain unchanged. I think many will disagree with me, but I believe that the internship should make the student a specialist of the future. Specialist for today, he will be if you include it in your project. To be an expert of the past, he is taught in the university. Most students perceive the internship as a continuation of their studies. This is the right approach, and this is how employers should relate to this. And if you create a specialist from the intern of the future, you should set as high a starting point as possible for him, focusing his development on learning more advanced technologies.
Based on this situation, it is obvious that you need to choose smart, capable, and most importantly, motivated students. Having brought the intern to the company, it is necessary to discuss which project he will be working on. Perhaps it will be something related to the production of, say, building a PoC architecture, modeling super-complex structures or interactions. The main thing is that the project should be interesting for both the intern and you. At the same time, you should try to use technologies that nobody owns in the company, including the intern himself. Next, determine the project objectives and plan the work. Here it is important to find a “middle ground” without leaving the intern with the problem one on one, but without overloading it with control lines, risks and Gannta charts. In the course of work, it is necessary to regularly monitor the success of the newcomer, to include mentoring specialists who should be well prepared in advance for such a role. An important role in the learning process is played by regular presentations that the student must conduct first to other interns, then to the specialists in his project, etc. Finally, sooner or later the intern will reach a level where he can independently submit his project to the customer. But many managers do not trust the interns and leave them "behind the scenes", presenting the development on their own. Here it is important not to be led by your concerns, but to provide the intern with the opportunity to talk about her work and directly receive feedback on the product.
This method of working with interns allows you not only to teach a student what you can do yourself, but to develop it as a specialist who will be in demand, will be able to develop independently and help others.
In the comments, we invite readers to share their view on attracting interns and students to work in real projects. :)
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/273197/
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