Understanding Your College Hire - An Introductory Manual

 

If we adjust the actuator on the difference engine, we can increase the pneumatic output of the processor by 5%

Sorry, I'm still getting over the Meta.ai-generated image for this post as I start to compose it.  This is what I get when asking for "a new software engineering college hire"?  This looks like the kind of youngster who'd chase me down the tenements of New York to sell me on self-cleaning spats (they're copesetic, I say!).  Oh well.

Today, I want to talk about good practices for making sure that your new college hire is set up for success as they make the transition from the extremely structured environment that is academia to the hot mess that is the Corporate World.

Depending on the size and structure of your company, some of these may be difficult to implement, but the basic components are all the same - starting with this one: don't fall prey to the trap of assuming that you need to have your college hires work their way up the ladder.

I get the urge.  Depending on your age, you probably got treated like garbage in your first role, or, worse, you graduated just before Y2K and had to start programming in COBOL.  

In one of my first jobs with a mechanical engineering degree, I had to work for a couple of psychopaths, sweeping the maintenance shop starting at 5:30 AM.  My reward was having thousands of dollars worth of textbooks unceremoniously tossed in the garbage because books are for burnin' not for learnin'.

In the next one, I was called out on my performance review for asking the president of the company (in a small meeting a few months prior, but it shouldn't really matter if it was an all-hands) why we didn't get bonuses if we were participating in profit sharing and the company made a profit.  The Asshat in Charge assumed I was challenging him (again, which shouldn't matter) rather than asking a question about a concept I was too young and naive to understand.  He showed me the depths of his pettiness!

In another, as a newly minted grad student in CS I got fired 6 months into my job after "completing the first 90, no 99% of my work satisfactorily" (you better believe I used that line several times in interviews afterward) after sobbing the month before at a team meeting due to stress (I leave that one out of the interview).  This is a job where my unemployment benefits ran out two weeks later because I made too much money working two days a week at Starbucks.

My point isn't to harp on my own perceived past slights, because I had a part to play in setting up these scenarios, and it wasn't always a downtrodden pushover. Rather I want to emphasize that maybe entry-level employees deserve a bit more consideration than some companies - even today - give them.  In theory you're hiring them because they're talented and have enormous potential.  Why squander that with your own pettiness and a need to carry forward past grievances?

Here are a few pointers for avoiding awkward moments where you bring your new hire to tears:

• Give them the most interesting projects to work on at the start.  You've got someone who's still a wide-eyed dreamer and is eager to ply their new trade. Don't dull that by giving them the most menial tasks to blunt their enthusiasm.  If you get them hooked on the interesting stuff, they'll be much more invested in honing their craft on the details (i.e. the mundane work) as they progress, because you'll have allowed them to establish a sense of ownership.
• Try to give them a small project they can lead and that will make a difference.  This runs counter to my advice on interns who are just happy to contribute.  You're cultivating a longer-term relationship with someone you expect to see grow.  You don't want to give them something critical, because they need time and space to mature in their career, but, if you can give them an internal tool to improve or give them the first crack at rewriting one of your site's pages, you can empower them without over-burdening them or placing too much responsibility in their hands.
• Pair them with as many senior engineers on the team as possible over the course of their first few projects.  This gives your seniors a chance to display their mentorship styles and helps build relationships one at a time with the team.  It also allows your new hires to develop their own style rather than mimicking one particular engineer's habits.
• Expect that they will know next to nothing.  At every stage of my academic career, I always had a teacher or professor give us The Talk - you've made it this far but in (middle school/high school/college/the corporate world) you won't be coddled.  You'll succeed or fail based solely on your merits.  This is, of course, bullshit, specifically in the corporate world.  There are people who can nap during meetings and be fast-tracked to an SVP role.  Others can make meaningful contributions, but speak mild truth to power and be labeled as difficult to work with.  
• In general, corporations, though petty, don't revert to atavistic behavior.  They at least make an attempt to provide the appearance of support to new hires.
• What is different, though, is that there is a lack of structure moving from an academic environment to a working one.  There are no longer tests with known answers.  There are now projects that aren't guaranteed to succeed.  Outside of work, students aren't grouped together on campus.  They're now left to try real adulting.  All of this can be a shock in aggregate.  At least it was to me.
• Give them structure in the first year of their transition to the corporate world.  The junior engineers I've worked with who were labeled low performers almost always had one thing in common in their first year - they were passed from manager to manager without having any stability around their performance expectations.  It's hard to come from a highly structured environment to one with no structure.  It's even more difficult to do it when you don't have anyone consistently in your corner.  This is difficult for seasoned engineers to deal with.  Imagine how it feels if you haven't ever been exposed to this kind of churn.
• Give them a cohort to be a part of.  As much as the budget allows (and I think you should probably sacrifice other parts of the hiring budget to make this work, because it's a solid continuous investment in the company's future), give them a "graduation" class to be a part of.  The interns don't all need to start on the same day, but structure events and activities over the course of the summer (most likely, given graduation dates) that allow them to bond as a group.  It will help them build their own sub-culture and support network, thus improving their view of the company.
• Don't begrudge them for having a better experience than you did at the same stage.  As humans, aren't we inclined to work toward a better future?  Celebrate the fact that this group of ingenues has the chance to attend a Cubs game as part of a work outing rather than mumble to yourself "back in my day...".  Who knows, at some point, you may be asked to chaperone them to let them know the difference between binge drinking after finishing finals and binge drinking at a corporate outing.
• Don't encourage them to binge drink.
• Don't coddle them. Remember that they're adults and should be treated as such.  You don't want to lay too much responsibility on their inexperienced shoulders, but that doesn't mean you should absolve them from all such responsibility.  Common sense plays a good role here in conjunction with a good dose of empathy and forgiveness.  Don't expect someone to know something you consider basic on the first try, and don't expect them to pick something up the second time if it's complicated.  However, you should see your employee progress.  If you don't, make sure you're checking with others around you to ensure your own learning-style biases (or just plain biases) aren't clouding your reason before taking corrective action.

And that is how you take a newly minted college hire and turn them into a prize-winning fern.  Or a successful engineer.

Until next time, my human and robot friends.