Practo Engineering — Onboarding experience as a fresher
I joined Practo almost a year back, right after the college. First day at Practo, I was introduced to its culture and history. It was a pleasing experience as I got my employee Id and access cards, new Mac Book Pro, #dogreat Book 4 and other Practo goodies.
Since I was fresher and a part of Engineering, I’ve to go through an awesome in-house training programme called “Jedi School” inspired from the famous movie Star Wars. In this school, you are going to trained by the top Developers and Architects of the company from Programming Basics to a Professional level.
My batch was consist of 30 padawans including me everybody was new to this, So I got the chance to make some good friends. We used to have two lecture everyday, one in morning and other in evening of one and half hour each. Every lecture consist of pre-reading, pre-reading quiz, post-reading and assignments. Assignments are too good, by the way you have to finish them in 48 hours, you acquire so much by implementing industry level software development paradigm. Every padawan have to go through the different lecture series e.g “Welcome to Practo (WP)”, “Programming Basics (PB)”, “Effective Business Communication”, “Introduction to Web/Mobile”, “Product Thinking”, “Practo Specifics, Doing it right” etc.
My first assignment was to write about my learnings in past 4 years and what were my expectation from Jedi School, easy right, but you have to think a lot about your learnings, and describing them in atleast thousands words. Well enough, next assignment from “setting the right expectation” lecture was to write a chrome extension to show the imdb rating to movies listed on any website. I think these were the easiest assignment of all lecture series. You can grasp so much stuff with details from these lecture because they are highly interactive and some times they force you to work in teams of 3–4 people and it’s very good experience as you become aware of how much communication is necessary for team work. In Product Thinking lecture series, You acquire knowledge of user experience, design sprint and gamification.
After completing your journey to Product Thinking, now its time to reality check, you have to showcase your learning to an evaluation panel through a production level project, they call it Hello world project. You work under a mentor who help you with blockers in your project. For me, this was the most hectic time as I’ve to complete the glitch free production level project in 10 days and more than fifty percent of my time was spent on planning and rest on development and testing. Evaluation panel is really tough on you because they ask each and every details on “why did I do this not that ?”. They push you to your limits. After all, You gain so much from this intermediate project from training.
Apart from this, Jedi School trains you to know how non-tech departments works, e.g. How sales happens?, How do we serve and train our customers after sales? In this phase of training you go on the field, observe and understand the market and patients experience. You sit with different operations teams and get to know how do Practo resolves the customers queries and understand how do they raise tickets and resolve it in given time using in-house ticketing system Chronos. And yes, you have to present your learnings and give feedback on how can we improve, from this phase to evaluation panel.
After sales and ops phase, you come back to your engineering classes of Jedi School. Now you go through the Practo Specific lecture series and learn about Practo tools, codebases (historical context), best practices and taking code into production. On completion of this, you go through security, performance, scaling, logging and monitoring etc. After these lecture, you are eligible to take production project and you have to present the feature you built in production after a sprint.
Jedi School was the best training programme in my life. Jedi School is more like college but with great learnings. I would say it helps in smooth transition of a fresher from college to industry.
Practo is very Open in its culture as it has very less hierarchy levels, everyone is approachable. Even in production, I’m learning from the best minds, my mentor and seniors are very helpful. We daily phase a real world problem, we think, we talk and share ideas, this is how we solve it. Practo Sponsors the tickets for different tech conference for you so that you are aware of new tech in town. We usually go for party on weekends, team outing and have fun in office activities. You should be afraid of your birthday bash as you do in college.
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