Training in a Sofware Giant

Jan 2003 - I joined my dream company in software industry. Very excited and a lot of plans to work on for future.
First attack came in form of another training in which you need to again study for few months. It was important, required and very useful but still..studying again.. Ok.. go over with it. It was quite fun as luckily it was not a whole day classroom sessions type and there was much hands on a real PC, so I actually get to do what I really wanted. Also it gave everyone a chance to look into different perspectives as you would be working as a group and so team work was also being mixed with our behaviour without any explicit effort. Getting some sessions from real programmers was very helpful in directly relating training to a practical scenario.

I learnt a very good lesson that the basics of programming is the only thing one need to know and picking up syntax can be done in a short span and you can become good in any programming language. Still for making an impact like an expert will take time as you then need to go into intricacies of that particular programming language and see how actually it works at memory label. For this again you need to be good and clear about how a computer machine works to produce output from your program. All part of our job..so it is just not 1 and 0, it has a hell lot of other things.
One should not just try to become expert in syntax using which he can understand already written program fast and code fast. But one should also try to see how actually it can be done in a different way and what are the differences in doing in each way. That is how a programmer will go into performance and non-functional part of programming which is many times missed by a typical programmer. It is just not the system which should take care of non-functional features, but also the way how program is written will decide and create an impression for a programmer. So future coders.. keep this in mind while coding next time :).
Also I learnt a very good lesson in my final test. Even if you know how to write a code, you are not as good as a programmer who knows from where to copy/paste. It sound funny and I know many of you will be against me, but in this industry what actually matters? Output, right? So if a person knows from where to copy/paste he already know what piece of code is required. And by knowing the location from where to pick it only speeds up his work. So producing a similar code and in faster time is always better. That's why Copy/Paste is a accepted mantra for software development. No shame about it and it is actually a progress as you can dramatically increase your productivity if you get expert in this capability. Keeping a good repository of generic code snippet also helps in this quality of yours while increasing your knowledge level. Try it, it is worth much more that you think :):).