Welcome to our world. It's great that you're already thinking about these things, but there's probably nothing to worry about.
You've already figured out the most important thing about joining the work world: School doesn't really prepare you for it. I'm not suggesting that school is unimportant, but that it really provides only a narrow set of benefits. A good college education should teach you two basic things: how to think clearly and critically, and how to learn.
Any reasonable employer hiring someone directly out of school should be looking primarily at these two things and not at whether you know assembler, Oracle, C++ or .Net. Regardless of the specific technical skills you learned, they will be obsolete before you know it.
To successfully enter the workforce, you really need only one more thing, and based on your question, I suspect that you've got it. You need a burning desire to be more than you are today. Without the drive to grow, your education means nothing. If you've got these three things -- clear thinking, active learning and the desire to grow - you're probably in great shape.
That said, let's take a look at your specific concerns. First, competence. As I've already suggested, don't worry too much about this. Whatever you are going to be hired to do, you've probably never done it before. Your managers will expect you to learn on the job or send you to a class. Entry-level positions pay less than those that require more experience, not because you are young, but because managers expect you to develop your competence and not to arrive with it fully formed.
And finally, office politics. My advice here is to not worry about it. Your first concern should be to focus on developing your competence and delivering value. Keep your head down and do your work. Let your boss protect you from and worry about the politics. At this stage of your career, it shouldn't be an important thing for you to deal with.
In case you have trepidation about this, it's also important to know that in technical organizations, office politicians tend to be rather ham-fisted. As geeks, we're generally not the most adept politicians on the corporate landscape. So don't worry, and enjoy your new life.
I've got some brilliant technical guys who like developing new things but don't want to do any maintenance work. How can I handle this? I think that you've discovered a flaw in the typical hiring and management approach for technical people. When I read an ad for a technical position, it typically gives a laundry list of languages, packages and industry experience required. It assumes that if someone possesses all those technical skills, he should be a great fit.
Unfortunately, it just ain't so. People don't just have skills; they also have personalities. They have wishes, desires, aspirations and orientations.
I would describe one of the key orientations found among technical people as "attitude toward innovation," and the degree to which individual IT workers display this attitude falls somewhere on a linear scale. At one end of the scale is "invention," and at the other is "perfection." People with a work orientation somewhere toward the invention end of the scale are interested primarily in making new things, creating from nothing. They view their work as a Promethean exercise. These are the types of people who like to design and build Version 1.0 of some new system. They consider this type of work real work and are bored by the incremental nature of working on Versions 1.1, 1.1a, 1.2, etc.
People who fall toward the "perfection" end of the spectrum are much more comfortable with, and excited by, taking something that exists and refining it until it screams of competence. They are not interested in making massive conceptual leaps but are happy taking something that is good and making it great.
This innovation/perfection orientation is completely unrelated to technical skills. You can find people with a wide variety of orientations with exactly the same skills.
But to develop and maintain outstanding technology, you need a mix of people with these orientations. Neither inventors nor perfectors alone will get you where you need to go.
It sounds like you've hired a disproportionate number of inventors and are asking them to do "perfection" work. In this case, you may need to re-evaluate your mix of people. At least you may need to mix up the work. Most inventors can do perfection work, as long as they see it as limited in scope and duration. They need to see the probability of new invention on the horizon to hammer through things that they'd rather not do.
SIDEBAR
Managers' Forum: Readers Talk Back
Although I agree with your response [Nov. 28], I have an additional suggestion. Applying the principles outlined in Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono (Back Bay Books, 1999) is a nonconfrontational method of quickly regaining control over the direction of brainstorming sessions and meetings. When there are negative disruptions, participants can be reminded that they are wearing "black hats," when brainstorming requires "green-hat" thinking. An additional benefit is that most people begin to realize they are predominately one "hat" or another and can work toward shifting their overall outlook and approach to things. -- PDR
Regarding the two lifers you call curmudgeons: Did you ever for a femtosecond even think that they could be right and that the manager could be totally wrong? How about giving them the challenge to come up with options that may work? -- DR
Sure, I think it's highly likely that two long-term, experienced employees can be right about what won't work. But when two people feed off each other and complain that everything is impossible, I think it's unlikely that they are right about that. They are just being negative.
Managers should always presume that long-term employees have lots of valuable input and ask them to use their skills to help make the business better. But when their input is exclusively negative, their value is limited.
Is it possible that a manager can be wrong on individual issues? Sure. Managers have the same ability to be mistaken, silly, vain, confused and fearful as everyone else. But even the worst manager is unlikely to be wrong about everything, just as the most curmudgeonly employee is unlikely to be right about everything. -- Paul Glen