Getting graduates up to speed?

Posted by Simon on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Simon
Published on 2011-03-03T15:40:00Z Indexed on 2011/03/04 23:32 UTC
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self-improvement

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programming-practices

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freshers

This question got me thinking about how comapnies deal with newly-hired graduated.

Do experienced programmers expect CS graduates to write clean code (by clean I mean code easily understandable by others — maybe that is too much to expect?)
Or do significant portion of graduates at your place (if any) just end up testing and fixing small bugs on existing applications?
And, even if they do bug fixes, do you end up spending double the amount of time just checking they did not end up breaking anything and creating new bugs?

How do you deal with such scenarios when pair programming and code reviews are not available options (for reasons such as personal deadlines), and also what techniques did you find to get fresh graduate up to speed?

Some suggestions would be great.

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