Prodio’s Full Stack Dev Program
You can apply for our FSD program by clicking here https://forms.gle/TwRxQbQHTqZSf4aH8 , but please do after you’ve read this whole article.
If you asked a person charged with hiring engineers what is his greatest problem, what do you think he’s going to tell you?
I think he’s mostly going to say — young engineers f***’in suck. And they don’t even know that.
And, if you ask him further — why don’t you hire engineers who have already turned into professional developers, what do you think he’s going to do?
He’s going to slowly roll his eyes, sigh, stay silent for a few seconds and then burst into a full on rage on his face — the half baked cookies would have worked on half ass projects that they neither started, nor finished , and already consider themselves so entitled , before they get their engineering straight, they’re already on to culture bull shit. NO WAYS.
And I say this after having interviewed more than 1500 people across multiple campus placement years, office interviews, tele phone interviews and F-T-F.
And hence The FSDP — we’re going to make the engineers how they should be made.
First, why full stack?
Because, while the engineers were pulling their sorry asses through their engineering course, the world changed. Technology exploded. The cloud exploded. It’s no longer one giant monolithic code, or 3 tier architecture & MVC sing songs.
We’re now in an open source, distributed computing, multi-tier architecture times with micro-services that you build and that you got from others, bundled together to build a product that itself is going to change — every f’ing day. You gotta build it , ship it , break it & build it again and ship it again.
And while this has to be done staying small & nimble — agile. And sometimes your team mate is not going to be in office and you’ll have to handle his shit. There are no backups or slack team mates. And if you think you’ll do all of this in a bigger company in more organised manner, you’ll have to just see how bad they are from the inside.
The real great engineering is happening at the small companies. And the small companies don’t have time to pander to your limitations — they want FULL STACK DEVELOPER , period.
So, how do you become one?
By doing. By landing yourself in a place whose culture is immersed in engineering.
Then working your way through the problem statements the team is working on, through the processes that typically operate large open source distributed developer teams work through, at first nibbling small problems and delivering value and gradually moving towards the core of engineering architecture design, tinkering with various techs and building small and large applications that scale and test if they actually do.
And while you are a clueless fresh engineer, you need an invisible hand moving you through a structured program organised quarter by quarter with clear learning outcomes so that unbeknownst to you, you become that FSD that people freely tout on their resumes as pure bullshit.
Prodio has such a structured program of 3 years. It makes an engineer, an FSD.
And if you think it shouldn’t take 3 years, keep that opinions to yourself because we know it takes that much.
Who is cut out for it?
There are a few important pre-qualifications. Only those who have it will make it to the other end. Divided into attitude and aptitude , there is zero chance that anyone who doesn’t have these will become an FSD.
And here they are:
- Agency — You gotta be high on agency. You must be the guy who says I’m going to make things happen. It’s me who is going to do it. There may be many things that go into succeeding at something but finally it’s me and my effort that will bring it all together because I’m going to f’ing make this happen. You don’t yapp about how shitty your college, professors, curriculum, caste, family , health or any other factor was. BRING YOU on the table and set out to win, don’t bring your sorry ass excuses.
- Clarity — you got to know who you are, where are you headed, what do you want to do, what do you have and don’t have , what options do you have, how do you find your way , what do you don’t know , what are you confused about and need to find more, what is a grand idea of your life and what’s your current micro plan for reaching there , how do you know it’s working or failing etc etc etc. The point is — in a given situation if you are not able to see through with clarity and communicate with clarity, you have no business attempting this. You’re already a looser.
- Communication — if you can’t get your point across in clear written and spoken communication — f’off . This thing is not for you.
- Intelligence — that raw ingredient of logic, reasoning and understanding of engineering (and non-engineering) situations.
- Seriousness — this thing is not a joke. We ain’t sitting here on bean bags, celebrating b’days and working while listening to music. Either you are making it happen seriously or faking it, we’ll know.
- Team Player — this work happens in a team. You’ve to trust your team and it should be able to trust you. Sometimes you carry their load and at other times they carry yours. You gotta be able to bond with your team at a deeper level or working together on something serious.
- Reliable- a lot of things go into being reliable. Your word should matter. You should be able to be on time. You should follow through things, if you said you would. There has to be a basic integrity between what you think, what you say and what you do. Only then your team can rely upon you.
- Learnability- different people have different learning styles, but each has one. We’ll be able to spot that one.But there is no place if you ain’t got none.
This, you see, needs well formed people. And AGILE teams cannot function without well formed people.
The actual program
The program is split into two parts. The entrance part and the trainee part.
The Entrance
A paid traineeship consisting of 12–16 weeks of taking a candidate through four broad areas.
- Product — how products are defined, designed from client briefs
- Quality — where development process fails the product envisioned
- Development — make it & show it
- Processes — make it , but in a well thought out way, so that it don’t fail
Each stage is approximately 4 week long.
The product stage covers working with prod team to learn:
Persona- who is the user and what does he want
User journey — how does he use the product to get it
Prototype — how do all user journeys tie up together into a great product
Client Brief — what was it that the client wanted
Feature Brief — be able to give a feature brief to developers
Research — figuring out how other people have done it
Quality stage covers working with prod & dev team simultaneously to learn:
Prod Audit — walk through design and punch holes, find what’s wrong
Prod Test — test products to find what’s wrong
Test Case Audit — spot what cases were missed
Processes stage covers :
AGILE — understanding agile manifesto and living it
GIT — version control through git
Unit of Work — Feature-Requirement-Test Case hierarchy
Staging — various environments and how code goes there
Work Assignment — who gets work and how and how must he respond
Communication — how to work together talking common jargon
Development stage covers working with dev team to learn:
Test Driven Development — write test cases for a given design
Commit & Merge Strategy — know how & where to commit your code
Release Cycles — know your release cycles
Write Code — write code and see it going into production on a live project
Debug — solve for reported problems in existing code on a live project
Some time during these phases you will find yourself working more and more closely with a particular product team. And based on our assessment of your ability to actually become an FSD, we will offer you some time towards end of this period an offer to join the trainee FSD program.
For those where its very clear you don’t fit, we’ll ask you to discontinue the program as soon as it becomes clear to us you are failing our criteria.
So when do you actually become an FSD?
You become an FSD by what you do during the first three year of your transition from an L1 to L3. By the end of which it will be clear to us if you’ve lived upto our standards of an FSD or not.
What happens after that is elaborated here for further read if you wish to.
Apply for Prodio’s FSD Entrance, if you think you have it.
You can apply for our FSD program by clicking here https://forms.gle/TwRxQbQHTqZSf4aH8 , but please do after you’ve read this whole article.
