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Payback – it’s time to give back to the society

“I wish if someone had told me this when I was in engineering” – we have said this many times in last 10 years.

Addressing this particular issue is the primary motive behind “Payback” – an initiative which we are starting this year. We are going to interact with as many students as we can so that they don’t have to go through the pain which we have gone through.

The idea came when we got the opportunity to interact with the students of Aptech in Bapunagar on 17th January 2014 – just one day after DIGICORP turned 10.

Abhishek and I decided to take up this opportunity. The students broadly wanted to know, “What does the software industry expect from us?”. We wanted this to be an informal and interactive dialogue rather than a monologue.

First we had a short discussion with Aptech management about student’s expectations from the talk. We started our discussion with students after that.

Rather than focusing on the usual questions like,

• Which is the upcoming technology in the market?
• Do you take fresh college graduates in your company?
• Do you give project trainings?

We told them about our beliefs and thought process. We tried to explain “Why?” rather than “What?”.

Here is what we believe every college student should learn

• Focus on your writing skills. Go through this and practice writing. Write on your own blog, write comments on others blogs, write emails to random people, but just keep writing.
• Contribute to Open Source communities. Create a strong profile on StackOverFlow and upload your source code to Github. Strong profiles on these two communities is your CV.
• Must read books
  • Getting Real: For building better web-based apps. This is a free PDF. Start reading it now.
  • Rework: It’s time to rethink how business is done. As a part of Payback, we have started distributing this book to library of the institutes where we do these interactions.
  • Purple Cow: Create remarkable products.
• If you are building a software product, check out this article from Ryan Singer. This is a real simple explanation of approach towards building usable software products.
• Check out this article before sending your CV to any company.
• Do not underestimate the importance of testing, implementation and support in the software development lifecycle. They give you maximum exposure to the end user which is a real thing. Only programming restricts your overall development as a programmer.

Apart from above points, we told them about two very important values which we learned over a period of time. They have been part of our core cultural at DIGICORP.

• Relationships can only be open and honest: Be honest to yourself, your colleagues and your employer, for e.g.
  • Do not write more projects or technologies on your CV which you haven’t done or don’t know. Write one or two good projects which you have actually done.
  • If you do not know about any particular technology or any question in your interview,  just say “I do not know”.
• Growth and Learning is life: Invest in learning, for e.g.
  • Spend money on good books and good internet connection over other priorities in life. It will change your perception towards the world and life.

We felt satisfied after this interaction. We wish at least one of them gets inspired by this discussion.

We aim to do at least one such interaction every two months i.e. six interactions a year. If you think, we can help you and your college friends, please contact us via our website.

Finally, thank you Aptech for giving us this opportunity. This has allowed us to start an initiative which is very close to our heart.