I See Sharp

Every little kid out of high school wants to study computer science and engineering in university. However, many of them are just into comp. science because it's something popular to study. Yes, it's a "popular" subject.

I wouldn't recommend computer science and engineering to people who just don’t know what they’re going to do later. You’ll end up hating the coding, and coding is what you’ll spend your time doing.

Personally, I eat, drink, sleep and live with code. I don’t think I’ll get bored of coding someday. Coding… or designing software / classes. But you might. And you’ll hate your work, the company you work for, and your life in the end.

Anyway, you might also turn out to be a great coder, and actually enjoy coding. Who knows? But don’t rush into computer science and engineering just because it’s the only best thing to study right after agriculture.

Now, a little update for you guys. As soon as you’re out of university, you won’t be earning a lot. Nope. A certain company in Mauritius recruited a few programmers (that was last year), and paid them Rs 8000 / month. That’s about US$ 280 a month. After six months of training, their salary was raised to Rs 11, 000 – Rs 12,000 (US$ 385 - US$ 420). I’ve heard that another company (located in the cybertower) pays its programmers US$ 525 a month (Rs 15,000). Is there really a future for programming in here?

The main argument of most employers is – “Mauritian programmers just can’t code properly.”

True. Before becoming a good programmer, what you need is experience. As a friend of mine once said – “Fucking muppets need fucking training”. To all of you guys who chose comp. sci and eng. just because it’s a cool thing to study – you’re not going to go far if you don’t start moving your butt.

Also, if we didn’t have so many people studying computer science, we’d probably be off with a smaller number of programmers, but more motivated and skilled.

Good Programming

Good programming practices are what will make of you a better coder. You can either learn the hard way – i.e. code, code, and keep coding. You’ll eventually understand why people use try’s and catch’es. You’ll understand why people put comments in their code, why people use NUnit. You could also start learning about good programming practices right now. There are tips and hits everywhere on the net.

The Substandard Programming Nation

As someone previously pointed out to me, the education system in here is all about spoon-feeding. That’s why most Mauritian programmers would back off as soon as they hear that they got to implement a shortest-path algorithm on a graph.

“Hell, isn’t there a method to do that in C#?”

Jesus fucking Christ. C# does have a lot of methods, but they’re here to make your life easier, not to do all the work. What, did you expect to find a method WankMe()? Well, FuckYou(). You need to work on your coding skills. Else, Mauritius will only be a god-damned sub-standard outsourcing paradise destination, with only sub-standard programmers who don’t know that there needs to be a try and a catch statement when trying to open a file.

That said, let us not forget that there really are some good coders in this country. People who are really motivated to learn more, sharpen their skills, and become good and better coders.

It’s all about the code.

# posted by Rowy @ Friday, July 22, 2005