[BangPypers] Responding to people who lack the curiosity

Anand Balachandran Pillai abpillai at gmail.com
Sun Jun 14 08:00:49 CEST 2009


On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 11:15 AM, Kenneth Gonsalves <lawgon at au-kbc.org>wrote:

> On Saturday 13 June 2009 16:07:42 Kiran Jonnalagadda wrote:
> > Doctor? Architect? Lawyer? They require dedicating a serious chunk of
> your
> > life and are one-way streets.
>
> not so. I am just back from interviewing over a hundred would-be
> programmers
> whose parents have dedicated a serious chunk of their cash to put them
> through
> and engineering degree. And now they are jobless and unemployable. It is
> also
> not true that Doctor? Architect? Lawyer? are one-way streets. I know an
> architect who is now an IT professional, and a lawyer who is on his way
> there.
> And several doctors who have done serious programming.
>
> If you really analyse things you will find that the people who embarrass us
> are
> almost invariably engineering or MCA graduates from the formal stream. The
> people from the informal stream - like aptech/NIIT graduates very rarely
> stray
> away from the tools they are taught.
>
> I find, in India anyway, the best programmers seem to be people who have
> _not_
> formally studied programming. Even from engineering the EEE and ECE guys
> seem
> far more likely to go the self-learning path that we are looking at.
>
> Again there is a clear distinction between people who are taught and people
> who learn. Most of those who are taught expect to be taught their whole
> lives
> - and those who learn ...


 I am a Mech. Engineer by degree but a self-taught developer/software
engineer
 (I won't call myself just a "programmer", to me it is someone who writes
code
  when given specs, I am more than that).

 I taught myself C while in 3rd sem at college. I got my first job through
campus
 and since then I have been through 6-7 jobs, jumping from one to next when
 there was no "fun" in the project any more. I taught myself C++ in my 2nd
year
 at work, Java in my 4th year and Python about the same time, after a
fruitless
 wrestling with Perl where I was retired hurt.

 I have never sat on a Python course, but has conducted a couple of Python
 trainings abroad in universities to CS professors with more than 15-20 yrs
of
 experience.

  I am still a student of CS languages, trying out everything from Ruby,
groovy,
  erlang to D. I think there is still fire within me to learn and master a
couple of
  languages more though time is a problem right now...

  I completely agree with Kenneth.  Those who teach themselves things,
continue
  to learn, those who are taught always expect to be taught and stop
learning
  quickly. But then it is another fact that the former continue to be
successful
  engineers and the latter become managers, who go on to prove Peter's
  principle true in their careers.


> --
> regards
> Kenneth Gonsalves
> Associate
> NRC-FOSS
> http://nrcfosshelpline.in/web/
> _______________________________________________
> BangPypers mailing list
> BangPypers at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/bangpypers
>



-- 
-Anand
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