Teachers++

Have you ever encountered the line “Itna bhi nahi ata kya” (how come you don’t know this) in your personal, professional, or student life? Irrespective of whether you have encountered this or not if you feel this topic is worth discussing then hold on! Let me roll this from a software engineer’s perspective.

Be it corporate meetings, college assignments, or office projects we interact with our colleagues on day to day basis. All of us have landed in situations where we do not understand what is being talked about. While we should be supportive of each other in order to grow, there are times we aren’t. In this post, I will talk about how the culture of being unsupportive is growing with time. It may not hold true for most of the people out there but should not be new for a fraction of the audience.

In this information age, we have information at our fingertips. Whatever you may ever want to know is simply a google search away. There are thousands of free courses from across the globe at your disposal. Mankind had never experienced information sharing at such a scale. We always feel that the younger generation is much more advanced as compared to us. This is also a side effect of the progress we are making in different areas and the younger generation building on the progress. We are now more focussed on the breadth of the knowledge instead of the depth. It is need of the hour that has shaped our minds to become the jack of all trades and master of none. While this sounds good until now let me take a wrong turn.

I will be talking purely from the perspective of a software engineer. It is virtually impossible to know about everything. There are new technologies coming up every day, new programming languages are getting popular among the community. There are these big terms like blockchain, cloud computing, and machine learning that have come out of nowhere. Before you judge me on this, yes these technologies have come up because of years of research and development effort but given that this is not a technical post I can assume some degrees of freedom.

So before you ask anyone “Itna bhi nahi ata kya” (how come you don’t know this) please think twice. This is a very common experience, especially for freshers. It is the first week of her/his corporate life and this is how they are greeted with. It may sound as if this is no big deal just a question that can be taken positively. But I beg to differ, this is a question that may have long-lasting effects on any person if encountered repeatedly. Moreover, it doesn’t sound professional at all. It creates a sense of self-doubt that is hard to tackle. Some people may be able to cope with this but a small non-negligible fraction will go into a cautious mode. He or she may now think twice before commenting on anything, create a false impression oneself, and slowing and steadily move into a vicious circle.

I may be wrong but this is one of the prime reasons why most IT engineers hate corporate life. Where colleagues question the knowledge or abilities of colleagues instead of helping despite being in a senior role. A flower will not be able to thrive if cursed repeatedly. Other instances where we de-mean or belittle others work in a meeting room also comes in the same category. A simple act of terming the work simple or questioning the amount of work done in the wrong way can lead to a similar outcome. This is especially true of the management whose expectations are an all-time high. Thus failing to recognize some simple work moments which are crucial from the engineer’s perspective. I somehow feel that it is more prominent these days as people tend to have knowledge from diverse domains and they expect the same from others. Especially students from not so prominent institutes are victims of this.

Beware of your words as they may make or break someone. Instead of judging someone on their technical on non-technical skills we can help them and create a positive environment. Everyone has a different skillset and a different pace of comprehending things. Expecting them to know everything that you know about is outright wrong.

This Teacher’s Day, let’s embrace diversity and be more welcoming. Let us broaden our horizons. Let’s not ask questions, let us show them the path to the solution. Let us acknowledge that a person may not know everything and things can be learned. Let us accept that he may be better at other things, the things that you don’t even know about.

Let us be more teachers and a little less judgemental :)

And next time you hear “Itna bhi nahi ata kya” (how come you don’t know this) just say “haa bhai nahi ata hai” (yes brother I don’t know).