Prakmas does two things that are not obviously related. We build software for clients, and we train people in Full Stack, Cloud, and DevOps, including free internships. Running both at once has changed how we assess engineers.
Interviews measure interview skill
Watching somebody learn over eight weeks, rather than assessing them across an hour, makes the limits of a standard interview hard to ignore. Some of the strongest people we have worked with would have interviewed badly. Some who interviewed impressively went quiet the moment a requirement turned ambiguous.
What has actually predicted capability, in what we have seen: how somebody behaves when they are stuck, whether they read the surrounding code before adding to it, and whether they ask a clarifying question or quietly guess.
Teaching exposes the gaps in your own understanding
You find the edge of your own knowledge the moment you have to explain something to somebody who will ask why. Our engineers who mentor write clearer code and better documentation than they did before they started mentoring. We did not plan for that and would not have predicted it.
Why the internships are free
A paid programme selects for people who can afford to pay. A free one selects differently, and the pool we reach is wider as a result. That is the whole reason, and there is no more sophisticated one hiding behind it.
The honest trade-off
Mentoring costs senior time, and senior time is the binding constraint in any services business. We take that cost because people who come through the programme already know how we work before they touch client code, and because the alternative is hiring strangers on the strength of an hour.
Written by the Prakmas team, Hyderabad and Union City.
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