GilaMonster (7/1/2015)

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Rod at work (7/1/2015)

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I have to respond to this, especially when you say that it appears there's a DBA/Developer factory pressing out people all using the same mold. That reminds me of a time, early in my career, when we hired some guys fresh from the local university. They had excellent credentials and grades, and yet they struggled that first year. On their one year anniversary one of them told me that he was very unhappy with his computer science degree, because it didn't prepare him for the real world environment.

I'm probably going to be a little insulting in this, but...

Your company was partially to blame there.

You cannot take new graduates and expect them to magically perform like someone with multiple years of experience. No matter how good the university, no matter how well they teach the students, they can't reproduce the kinds of chaos, complexity and politics you get in real world companies.

Tossing a new grad in the deep end is planning for failure.

My company takes new grads in every year. They get a 2-month training course that builds on what they learned at university, then they are put onto a dev team with other experienced developers for the next 4 months. Then we consider them junior developers.