Some interesting observations about a country that boasts to be an IT super power or some such thing:
- Dearth of Domestic Market. Most of the money in IT sector comes from service export. Ironically, IT companies find it hard to find deserving customers (who can pay them as much as US/European customers) from within the country. We all use software systems purchased from outside, probably developed by Indians.
- Downloaders' country. We download and download. No, wrong. We do upload: tweets, facebook likes etc. But, open-source software, experimental results in tech. magazines and journal? Rarely.
- A Dumb Country. Literally. A country with millions of software engineers hasn't managed to come up with a (programming-)language of its own.
But above all are indicators. The disease is deeper.
- How many software engineers in our country are indeed capable to think beyond if-else-for-loops?
- Can we conceptualise products?
- We may flash stylish UML diagrams in executive meetings; but do we really know what software design/architecture is?
- Can we trust ourselves when it comes to writing an algorithm, data-structure on which someone can bet his money/life?
- How many of us do look beyond the fad (analytics, big data, cloud ...) into the real core of software (algorithm, data-structure, complexity, design, elegance, ...)?
(Reproduced from my Facebook post)
1 comment:
'going beyond the mundane' (writing algo/data structures in free time, doing hobby projects) comes with passion@job. We chose our job, not out of passion, but out of fear of unemployment. We lacked teacher/elder/role-models who influenced us to go after passion and in the process compromising the short term security of a job. Nor do I blame the earlier generation as they could not think in those lines in their cocoon of safe government jobs. 'Haalat hi kuchh aise the'.
We are not an extraordinarily dumb race. Nor are we extraordinarily smart. We (Indian) are as normal as the US folks. I broach US becuase I see that country as the fountainhead of most of the innovations. I like to believe that once we are financially more confident, once we are burnt by the curse of working without passion, we will start doing all the stuffs you wrote in your blog.
In fact, it has already started happening. The visible rise in the number of start-ups is one of the signs. I choose to stay optimistic as of now.
PS: I realize that my comment is rife with gross generalizations. Sometimes though, generalization is difficult to resist.
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