On Thursday 09 July 2009 07:56:49 Siddhesh Poyarekar wrote:
On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 7:31 AM, Kenneth Gonsalveslawgon@au-kbc.org wrote:
using this method I have been very successful in churning out employable people - from very unpromising material. There have been failures, because some people are incapable of learning.
Speaking of failures, I've seen many of my peers who do not attempt free software, or even something more challenging or different than what they are currently doing solely because of the fear that it is beyond them and that they would fail. Failure would mean they would be laughed at and their high college rank and prestige will be tarnished. So the best way out is to not try and simply claim that it is too childish, hippyish, useless, etc. But this is probably not an Indian outlook -- must be a global problem right?
very Indian - typical feudal thinking. My niece in a very prestigious school once found that in her notes the teacher had wrongly described convex and concave mirrors. So in the exam she wrote the correct definitions - and it was marked wrong. Her mother complained to the head mistress and was advised to advise the girl to write the wrong answer next time as anything else would undermine the teacher's authority.
on three occasions I was called in to consult with proprietary companies who wanted to use open source. Although they offered good money, I didn't last for more than a few hours in each company. 'Team lead' would not sit with team members for a session. Everyone was afraid to ask questions ere their ignorance would be exposed. And no one wanted to show their code to anyone else. And when the code was shown, they took it as an insult when bugs were pointed out. The attitude is so bad that if there is a bug in code written by a higher-up, the lower downs would never have the courage to file a ticket. They would work around the problem or just keep quiet.
as for collaborative development - no way. I write my code and you write yours and some 'integrator' can put the pieces together. This mail is getting too long ...