• Mate (unregistered) in reply to With a Side of Fries plz
    With a Side of Fries plz:
    This I just don't understand. It's not like you can just drop "teh codez" jar in and BadaBoom BadaBing it works. There will *not* be any documentation, so teh codez will have to be read and understood. Anyone who can do that does not need teh codez, as they can RTG and RTM.

    This doesn't make much sense. Surely one who doesn't know how to do a thing would benefit from exploring code that does it, even without having documentation of the code. Reading and understanding a piece of code doesn't equal to knowing how to implement it in advance, as you seem to imply.

  • David (unregistered) in reply to robaker

    Reminds me of the idiot check's on IRC.

    "How do I do <something mirc script related>?"

    "Oh, that's easy! Alt-f4" 1-3 user disconnected by peers later

  • spathi-wa (unregistered) in reply to DesignSpatial

    This really is the way most coders work here. The better ones get picked up for better positions and more often than not opt to go abroad for "on-site" work.

    For the rest of us, i.e. those who don't get chosen to represent a company abroad, or (like me) those who choose to not go, this method of getting work done is pretty much par for the course.

    One of my old PMs described the local situation very well: "it's a festival of mediocrity"

    Most other occupations do not require innovation on a day to day basis, so it doesn't really apply outside the coding profession. The stereotype may have formed recently, because I have not seen any discussions on this before. But this method is the way of life for most of the programmers I have worked with over the years.

    I am not sure of the origin of this practise but I can guess it comes from a combination of things, the most apparent being:

    --

    1. Laziness

    2. Lack of basic programming knowledge, including not knowing how to search documentation.

    3. Local culture encouraging the copy-paste practise. School going kids often don't understand basic english, do not employ it outside the academic need for reading or speaking english. It is easier and better to learn everything by rote to get through school and college. This is where we first learn to take someone else's formed opinion (or function), modify it slightly to fit the current question (or requirement) and pass it off as our own.

    4. Finally, the lack of meaningful vocational guidance. CS courses are the most sought after in diploma and degree colleges. Seats are limited for every type of course and so only the best students, i.e. the students who have most successfully followed the template-answer pattern in school, get admissions in CS courses.

    This leads to situations where a student who is academically excellent chooses CS purely because they will get a high paying job quickly in CMM3+ companies just for coming out on top. I have not completed college, but I have no problems with this trend except for the fact that the CS courses teach them nothing practical that they can apply in their jobs. We were still teaching COBOL, FORTRAN 2 years ago. I hear they have recently updated curriculum to include linux and .net programming in the final semester.

    What this amounts to is that innovative, inspired programming is not encouraged by faculty, because they lack the understanding to read code to see how well it works, and the time to compile every student's submission and test it. Few students have a genuine interest in the vocation.

    If (for example) civil engineering was paying better and did not provide too much of a challenge during the job, the same kids would opt for civil engineering sooner than CS. Aptitude and ambition rarely come into the picture.

    --

    Today we have a large number of CS graduates who are not fit to be employed without at least 2 months of training. More than that we have many non CS graduates who have taken 6-24 month "professional computer training" courses that attempt to teach them several computer languages. While these people manage to "learn" the languages, they still dont know how to program. The desire to do as little as possible to get the job and keep it shows itself right from the school/college level.

    The approach to the professional training is similar to what they did in school and college and while they have many certificates showing how well they did back then, their work rarely reflects the grades.

    Now I'm not sure how academia works in the West, and I feel it can't be too different, but I have worked with a few USA and UK programmers employed by our clients, and I can say that even the ones who did not have professional or academic CS training had a much more professional outlook and approach than the CS graduates and double graduates that I have worked with. This is the main reason why I feel it has more to do with vocational guidance than "just the way schools work here".

    Today getting an MBA is the guarantee to the highest paying jobs, and getting a CS/IT related MBA is the most sought after educational qualification.

    I know that I have made generalizations and I want to clarify that I am not exaggerating anything. When I say most, I really mean most. Of the ~100 local programmers I have worked with, less than 10 were actually interested in knowing how to do their job. 6 of these are now abroad. One is working for Yahoo India. Most (sorry) of the rest are still with the same company they were with when I first met them. I didn't find the Paula "Brillant" WTF as funny as the people who commented on it. Accepting a job without knowing how to do it, not admitting failure, endless excuses and hemming and hawing over delays is kind of standard procedure for some people here. They will switch jobs before they get fired, and keep them till their seniors start complaining.

    Of the ~40 US/UK and IT professionals I have worked with, 3 were self declared hobbyists who learned a bit of PHP over a few weekends. Only one IT dude (a system admin, not a programmer) was stuck up and refused to fix simple issues like updating the connection string in the web.config file without us sending a complete new "package" containing all the site files, a db dump, and the updated web.config file. And I am inclined to chalk that incident up to policy rather than a fear of breaking the unknown.

    I am not sure if this answers your queries, but I have done my best to analyse the situation. It's not very easy to do for me because I live here and much of this is not exceptional unless seen from an outsider's point of view.

    If you have any more questions, feel free to ask.

    DesignSpatial:
    spathi-wa,

    Your post provides some good insights on how those who are asking for "teh codez" do their work. It's certainly a different way of working than most of us in the West are familiar with.

    Is what you describe a stereotype, or is this truly the way that many coders work there? If it's the norm, what do you think the causes are for it? Is it the corporate culture, or the teaching methods in the school system, or is it the business models of particular companies? Does this mode of working extend to other occupations? I'd be interested in hearing your views on this.

    Jon.

    spathi-wa:
    Tei:
    You can send SMS messages trough email. is called email2sms gateways. Are paid servides.

    (quote snipped, find the post here )

    I have found this practice disturbing and felt cheated every time someone got promoted over me, knowing exactly how well the person could actually do his/her job without a bunch of plagiarized functions and sample code.

    Thank you dailyWTF for the opportunity to vent.

  • bd (unregistered) in reply to DOA
    DOA:
    Don't you just love it when Americans talk about offshorers online? Like the internet is located in the US and the rest of us are simply tapping in?
    Nope, the rest are just clogging the tubes.
  • Dave (unregistered) in reply to Danny

    Yes it is - he wanted to send SMS to a phone using J2ME.

  • (cs)

    Umm.. on the bottom of page 11 of this beast, someone actually had posted the code. I noticed it while I was browsing through randomly.

    http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=150293&start=150&tstart=0

    I'm pretty sure the code does that, it seems to be in response. Yet there are 12 more people posting "me too!"s

  • spathi-wa (unregistered) in reply to Serpardum

    That code doesnt seem to do much other than open a serial port and emit the input from the serial port to stdout

  • (cs)

    Er, people actually 'write' software like this you know :)

  • Cloak (unregistered) in reply to The Needful
    The Needful:
    And what percentage of the requestors appear to be from the subcontinent? Go ahead and flame, but my experience is that the originators of these kinds of requests are inordinately Indian or Pakistani.

    Offshorers, take note.

    krisharyan4u Posts:6 Registered: 3/25/04 Is it possible to send SMS using Java?
    Jul 15, 2004 12:45 AM (reply 17 of 332)

    hi,

    I am an Italian student who studies Computer Science , and I am developing some projects in Java .so can u please send me how i can do that in java. my email id is [email protected] Thank you very much in advance!!

  • Cloak (unregistered) in reply to Critter
    Critter:
    I suspect that the real WTF here is not the language skills of the posters, but rather the complete uselessness of the thread.

    Personally, I find it really irritating when I go googling for something and all I can find are a bunch of forums where the first post is a question and all subsequent posts, without exception, are either "I need this too" or "Anybody?!?". It tells me only that I am not alone, but does not get me any closer to solving the problem.

    TRWTF is that they are using human language

  • (cs) in reply to robaker
    robaker:
    If someone were to post some malicious 'codes' in response, how many of them would just paste it in and run it?

    Too many I fear.

    The root of the WTF is that this thread was not locked and perhaps deleted after first page... So much data noise makes my head hurt.

    Addendum (2007-12-14 08:57): My pet peeve are people who ask for something and say thanks in advance. I haven't done anything or you, so don't thank me, it comes of as extortion and suddenly I'm LESS interested in providing help than I was before:P

  • Stuntbeaver (unregistered)

    So does anyone actually have some code to send SMS via java? I am working on a project and need to send sms alerts.

    Just kidding!

  • Andrew (unregistered) in reply to Lorenzo
    Lorenzo:
    This article appeared at the end of 2002. The original poster asked a year earlier. The question itself is clear and concise, not a stupid one.

    The Wireless Messaging API

    by C. Enrique Ortiz December 2002

  • The Needful (unregistered) in reply to Andrew
    Andrew:
    Lorenzo:
    This article appeared at the end of 2002. The original poster asked a year earlier. The question itself is clear and concise, not a stupid one.

    Way to completely miss the point, dude.

  • Dude (unregistered) in reply to robaker
    robaker:
    If someone were to post some malicious 'codes' in response, how many of them would just paste it in and run it?

    that weuld fun stuff be

  • (cs) in reply to spathi-wa

    In fairness, there are a lot of people like that in the west as well. There may well be a higher percentage over there as I'm guessing most of the rent-a-coder jobs were the first ones to be outsourced, and based on the number of Indians in our universities and workplaces, you guys lose a lot of qualified engineers to the states. Over here the industry is competitive enough that many of those guys (though certainly not all, as this website proves over and over again) have been forced to take up a new career.

    spathi-wa:
    Tei:
    You can send SMS messages trough email. is called email2sms gateways. Are paid servides.

    You seem to have missed the point. Are you on the right website?

    I am an Indian living in India. I have been coding/programming professionally for 8 years now. The stereotype may be that (a stereotype) but I have worked with other Indian programmers, and I know from experience:

    1. They will not refer documentation. Ever. They wont even search google.

    2. They maintain a list of 'code websites' where examples and explanations of "How do do X in language Y" are put up by people hoping to educate someone else. e.g. codeproject

    3. They will go to each site searching for what they want at the moment. If they don't find what they need, they hit google. To search for message boards.

    4. google search: sms in java forum

    5. Finding a post that already requests a similar "sample code"/"example"/"detailed explanation" they will add a me too post.

    6. Whenever I turned up solutions from either experience or knowledge of the api/platforms, without asking 10 people or copying and pasting sample code, I have been asked "where have you done this before?" "was this your degree project?"

    "I just searched through some of the documentation!" is not an acceptable answer.

    When I was not so senior one of my managers went to the extent of looking through my browser history in disbelief.

    1. They have amazing skills like memorizing entire functions that are used more frequently such as general purpose functions. One of the girls I worked with would type out the whole thing including commented out debugging code.

    2. When I was leading a project, one of the teams was 2 days late on a delivery. The excuse offered was "we could not access [unrelated earlier completed project] files

    for 2 days and so could not start working on this on time". I refused to accept that, so it was taken up by my manager, who found it perfectly acceptable. It was explained to me: "common files such as db access functions and template handling routines could not be copied over from the earlier project so it is understandable that the module was delayed" .

    I have pasted the bits in quotes from the actual email correspondence.

    I have found this practice disturbing and felt cheated every time someone got promoted over me, knowing exactly how well the person could actually do his/her job without a bunch of plagiarized functions and sample code.

    Thank you dailyWTF for the opportunity to vent.

  • (cs)

    BTW, I'm loving those sun java forums. This one has to take the cake.

    That guy Java_Beginner (who if I had to guess is a student in an American university) has a couple other funny posts, but in this one he is posting a Java class (one that uses several Swing components) and is asking how to change it into a C++ program. Classic.

  • El Quberto (unregistered) in reply to Steve

    Note to all the India and China bashers: about 75 percent of my colleagues and co-workers here at the University of California, San Diego are of Asian or East Asian extraction. Most of them have advanced degrees and are freaking brilliant. Pick up an IEEE or ACM journal some day and look at the authors of the papers, some day.

    The point, let me show you. No one is bashing Indians or Chinese for being from that country, but rather the complete lack of any sort of investigation into a problem before posting "email me the codez" on a forum.

  • coerdz (unregistered) in reply to Steve

    They don't speak Urdu in India. Indians are either Aryan or Dravidian.

    Those who are Aryan speak Indo-European languages (same family as English) such as Hindi, Sanskrit, Bengali etc. Dravidians speak the Dravidian family of languages, most popular and largest of which is Tamil.

    Interestingly enough, all of India (90% +) follows the Aryan religions (i.e., anything based on the 4 aryan holy books, the vedas). The native southern Indian (dravidian) religions are now extinct. (and/or have become part of Hinduism). That's why you'll find the holy religious symbols such as swastikas and laltikas all over India, not just the North.

  • Zip (unregistered) in reply to robaker

    Sadly, most of them probably would, they are not much different than those at so called "hacking" forums asking how to become "l33t hax0rs".

  • CruxOp (unregistered) in reply to Steve
    Steve:
    Note to all the India and China bashers: about 75 percent of my colleagues and co-workers here at the University of California, San Diego are of Asian or East Asian extraction. Most of them have advanced degrees and are freaking brilliant. Pick up an IEEE or ACM journal some day and look at the authors of the papers, some day.

    Without them, most of our labs would dry up and blow away.

    Their language skills may leave something to be desired but I don't speak Mandarin or Urdu all that well, myself, so they're a couple of notches on the accomplishment scale there, too.

    India and china literally produce millions of new coders with BAs per year.

    Here's a rule of thumb: If they come to the US, they're brilliant. All of the immigrant students in my college are part of the top 2% of their graduating class in their country. They came to the USA to get paid.

    If they stay in their native land then:

    A) They're patriotic wave flag

    or more likely:

    B) They barely managed to scrape together enough knowledge to graduate, and barely managed to get hired with that. They're no good.

  • anoop (unregistered) in reply to Steve

    Not being picky! Urdu is hardly Indian ( if you are speaking about Chinese and Indian major languages...) You would normally use Hindi or one/few of the other major languages like Kannada (from Bangalore), Telugu (Hyderabad) or Marathi, Tamil, Bengali, Gujarati, Tulu, Punjabi, Malayalam, Oriya, etc etc - but Urdu is the least likely!

  • anoop (unregistered) in reply to Steve
    Steve:
    Note to all the India and China bashers: about 75 percent of my colleagues and co-workers here at the University of California, San Diego are of Asian or East Asian extraction. Most of them have advanced degrees and are freaking brilliant. Pick up an IEEE or ACM journal some day and look at the authors of the papers, some day.

    Without them, most of our labs would dry up and blow away.

    Their language skills may leave something to be desired but I don't speak Mandarin or Urdu all that well, myself, so they're a couple of notches on the accomplishment scale there, too.

    Not being picky! Urdu is hardly Indian ( if you are speaking about Chinese and Indian major languages...) You would normally use Hindi or one/few of the other major languages like Kannada (from Bangalore), Telugu (Hyderabad) or Marathi, Tamil, Bengali, Gujarati, Tulu, Punjabi, Malayalam, Oriya, etc etc - but Urdu is the least likely!

  • bzzzt (unregistered) in reply to robaker

    Enough to make some people worried: http://ubuntuforums.org/announcement.php?a=54

  • (cs) in reply to Lorenzo

    Sadly, this thread doesn't seem to be in the Sun forums any longer. Guess one of the Sun mods is a fan of TDWTF.

  • Neil (unregistered) in reply to robaker

    In case the above link didn't work for you (it didn't for me), here's another: [url]http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=150292&messageID=429907[url]...or you can just google for "java sms", and it's the second result, sadly enough.

  • assclown (unregistered) in reply to Steve

    If they where brilliant they wouldn't be asking for teh codez.

    I've met my share of good and bad programmers of different races and people love to make this a race thing which is fucking lame.

    The whole point was getting a laugh about the programmers that think that the others should be doing their work because they can't be troubled to look enough or figure out how.

  • Shill (unregistered) in reply to real_aardvark

    [quote user="real_aardvark"][quote] PS "Analyzing" is spelled with an "s", not a "z." You're welcome.[/quote]

    Not in American English which is the language commonly in use on this site. If it bothers you that there are different dialects of the English language, perhaps you should take up the issue with British people who created the conditions which necessarily led to the dialects when they colonized half the world.

  • dudz (unregistered)

    I am working on a project where i ned to send sms, it is urgent plez tell e how to send sms java api!!!!!!

  • (cs) in reply to Shill
    Shill:
    real_aardvark:
    PS "Analyzing" is spelled with an "s", not a "z." You're welcome.
    Not in American English which is the language commonly in use on this site. If it bothers you that there are different dialects of the English language, perhaps you should take up the issue with British people who created the conditions which necessarily led to the dialects when they colonized half the world.
    Nope, it's spelled with an 's' in American English, too. (Tho' I'm sure that the dictionaries get it wrong... :} ) The Greek root features a sigma, not a zeta. The basic cause of the error is nothing at all to do with "dialect" and everything to do with a false analogy from the "ization"/"isation" suffixes.

    Not sure that Ameringlish is the majority language on this site, in any case. And your suggestion is just plain weird -- I could take up my irritation at persistent ignorance with Noah W., were he still alive, but it's hard to see how arguing with long-deceased members of, say, the Indian Civil Service (all of whom learned Greek at school anyhoo) would alleviate this sad state of affairs.

  • Shill (unregistered) in reply to real_aardvark
    real_aardvark:
    Shill:
    real_aardvark:
    PS "Analyzing" is spelled with an "s", not a "z." You're welcome.
    Not in American English which is the language commonly in use on this site. If it bothers you that there are different dialects of the English language, perhaps you should take up the issue with British people who created the conditions which necessarily led to the dialects when they colonized half the world.
    Nope, it's spelled with an 's' in American English, too. (Tho' I'm sure that the dictionaries get it wrong... :} ) The Greek root features a sigma, not a zeta. The basic cause of the error is nothing at all to do with "dialect" and everything to do with a false analogy from the "ization"/"isation" suffixes.

    Let's see; dictionary.com agrees with me, not you. As does m-w.com. Google suggests using analyzing when I search for analysing. MS Word just changes analysing to analyzing without involving me at all. It's amazing all these authorities have it wrong when you have it right.

    Not sure that Ameringlish is the majority language on this site, in any case. And your suggestion is just plain weird -- I could take up my irritation at persistent ignorance with Noah W., were he still alive, but it's hard to see how arguing with long-deceased members of, say, the Indian Civil Service (all of whom learned Greek at school anyhoo) would alleviate this sad state of affairs.

    From my perspective you were complaining about the use of American English vs British English, which should make the suggestion clearer. You will have to forgive me for making the mistake and not realizing that you were railing against ignorance; I did not have access to the one authority (i.e. you) in the world that knows the actual spelling of analyzing (oops, there we go again; BTW Firefox prefers the z) in American English.

  • Lex (unregistered) in reply to robaker
    robaker:
    If someone were to post some malicious 'codes' in response, how many of them would just paste it in and run it?

    Hahaha, that's brilliant! :)

  • (cs)

    I made some Java code to call a PHP script to send text messages before.

    Here it is in case people don't have access to the servers needed for the messaging API: http://www.rscheata.net/tp/index.php/topic,11900.0.html

  • adwin (unregistered) in reply to Lorenzo

    if you googling "java sms" then the this thread will come first.

    the correct thread is http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=150292

    have fun!

  • adwin (unregistered) in reply to adwin

    they should use social networking for searching the answer. I found many answer using this :D http://del.icio.us/tag/java+sms

    students should learn how to use google and some social bookmarking to do their assignment. I use alot delicious for my job and for searching scripts :D

  • brach (unregistered) in reply to robaker

    I usually do that XD, and if it worked or do something that i need, i read it to understand what it does

  • Josh (unregistered) in reply to robaker

    Actually, can someone please send me this code too?

    ;)

  • Martin (unregistered)

    what a thread.. keep going on.. most enjoyable...

  • What the fucking hell? (unregistered) in reply to robaker

    Post Malicious code?

    Wow. Someone just re-invented fun!

  • prescott (unregistered)

    i really need the code to change world!!! here is my e-mail id -: [email protected]

  • TANUSRI GHOSH (unregistered) in reply to Publius
    Publius:
    The Needful:
    And what percentage of the requestors appear to be from the subcontinent? Go ahead and flame, but my experience is that the originators of these kinds of requests are inordinately Indian or Pakistani.

    Exactly! I've seen much worse than this post, and they'll post their questions in an article that's not remotely relevant. Like a Microsoft MVP (not even an employee) made a post about how Visual Basic was having its 10th birthday, he didn't even discuss code, but he had 10 pages of comments like "Dear sir, Kindly give me the vbcode, how to cofigure USB port. I am using Righttag scanner to read & write data into tag using vbapplication. Here is my e-mail address: [email protected]. thanx."

    Also, if you go to http://indiansex4u.com/ (NSFW, a message board where Indians post gross amateur porn of their wives), all of the comments are Indians talking to the women in the pornographic images, as if they think the women in the pictures actually live inside the webpage. "Hello my friend nice the sexy lady! I have 9 inch huge rod 4 u, how u liek tht? email me [email protected] plz".

    This phenomenon of addressing the women in sexy images as real people inside the computer is characteristic of Brasilians too, except that Brasilians don't bother speaking English, so they take their delusion a step further in thinking that a sexy American woman not only lives inside the webpage, but that she speaks Portuguese and is seriously tempted to move back to Brasil with him and live in his favela.

  • TANUSRI GHOSH (unregistered)
  • TANUSRI GHOSH (unregistered) in reply to TANUSRI GHOSH
    TANUSRI GHOSH:
    dear all, Am femail 26 yrs.. from india calcutta .. like to sale my sex to others against money.. if any one intersted ple contact me over e-mail.. satus : 5:8" fare bige boods ; nice sex ass.

    pls ask for sex over mail aginst money..

    rgds, tanu

  • Suni (unregistered) in reply to Publius
    Publius:
    The Needful:
    And what percentage of the requestors appear to be from the subcontinent? Go ahead and flame, but my experience is that the originators of these kinds of requests are inordinately Indian or Pakistani.

    Exactly! I've seen much worse than this post, and they'll post their questions in an article that's not remotely relevant. Like a Microsoft MVP (not even an employee) made a post about how Visual Basic was having its 10th birthday, he didn't even discuss code, but he had 10 pages of comments like "Dear sir, Kindly give me the vbcode, how to cofigure USB port. I am using Righttag scanner to read & write data into tag using vbapplication. Here is my e-mail address: [email protected]. thanx."

    Also, if you go to http://indiansex4u.com/ (NSFW, a message board where Indians post gross amateur porn of their wives), all of the comments are Indians talking to the women in the pornographic images, as if they think the women in the pictures actually live inside the webpage. "Hello my friend nice the sexy lady! I have 9 inch huge rod 4 u, how u liek tht? email me [email protected] plz".

    This phenomenon of addressing the women in sexy images as real people inside the computer is characteristic of Brasilians too, except that Brasilians don't bother speaking English, so they take their delusion a step further in thinking that a sexy American woman not only lives inside the webpage, but that she speaks Portuguese and is seriously tempted to move back to Brasil with him and live in his favela.

  • Jay (unregistered) in reply to bd
    DOA:
    Don't you just love it when Americans talk about offshorers online? Like the internet is located in the US and the rest of us are simply tapping in?

    Yeah, it seems like every country in the world other than the U.S. is run by a bunch of foreigners! France is completely dominated by French people, India by Indians, etc. No wonder all these other countries are so messed up.

  • Jay (unregistered)

    What gets me is when you try to give a helpful reply on a forum, and the person you're trying to help insults you. Like, one of my favorites, someone posted a question, I posted a reply, and then he wrote back beginning, "READ THE ENTIRE QUESTION BEFORE ANSWERING AND NOT JUST THE TITLE!!" and went on to ridicule me for not giving him a useful answer. Of course I had in fact read his entire post. I guess I misunderstood what he was trying to ask, whether because his question was poorly worded or because I mis-read it, whatever. But it just seems to me elementary common sense that if you're asking people to help you, there's nothing to gain by being rude and insulting to them. If there was a misunderstanding, maybe if you re-word your question they'll be able to help. I certainly was't interested in trying to help him any further after that.

  • Dan (unregistered) in reply to Steve

    Steve,

    While there are brilliant Chinese and Indians, there are also mind-numbingly stupid Indians and Chinese, as well as those who may be smart, but their language skills are so poor that you end up explaining things 3 or 4 times (or producing code 3 or 4 times) until they understand.

    The frustrating part is not that they exist - stupid Americans exist too. The frustrating part is that because they have a foreign name, they're assumed to be brilliant. And because their hourly rate is low, they're assumed to be saving money. In reality, they're often costing the company far more money in wasted time and effort than would be the case if the company just hired a developer. Add to that the complexities of dealing with time zones and zero face-to-face interaction, and it's my contention that thousands of companies are wasting far more money in the name of "outsourcing" than they would be if they just did the work themselves.

  • EREWS (unregistered) in reply to spathi-wa
    spathi-wa:
    This really is the way most coders work here. The better ones get picked up for better positions and more often than not opt to go abroad for "on-site" work.

    For the rest of us, i.e. those who don't get chosen to represent a company abroad, or (like me) those who choose to not go, this method of getting work done is pretty much par for the course.

    One of my old PMs described the local situation very well: "it's a festival of mediocrity"

    Most other occupations do not require innovation on a day to day basis, so it doesn't really apply outside the coding profession. The stereotype may have formed recently, because I have not seen any discussions on this before. But this method is the way of life for most of the programmers I have worked with over the years.

    I am not sure of the origin of this practise but I can guess it comes from a combination of things, the most apparent being:

    --

    1. Laziness

    2. Lack of basic programming knowledge, including not knowing how to search documentation.

    3. Local culture encouraging the copy-paste practise. School going kids often don't understand basic english, do not employ it outside the academic need for reading or speaking english. It is easier and better to learn everything by rote to get through school and college. This is where we first learn to take someone else's formed opinion (or function), modify it slightly to fit the current question (or requirement) and pass it off as our own.

    4. Finally, the lack of meaningful vocational guidance. CS courses are the most sought after in diploma and degree colleges. Seats are limited for every type of course and so only the best students, i.e. the students who have most successfully followed the template-answer pattern in school, get admissions in CS courses.

    This leads to situations where a student who is academically excellent chooses CS purely because they will get a high paying job quickly in CMM3+ companies just for coming out on top. I have not completed college, but I have no problems with this trend except for the fact that the CS courses teach them nothing practical that they can apply in their jobs. We were still teaching COBOL, FORTRAN 2 years ago. I hear they have recently updated curriculum to include linux and .net programming in the final semester.

    What this amounts to is that innovative, inspired programming is not encouraged by faculty, because they lack the understanding to read code to see how well it works, and the time to compile every student's submission and test it. Few students have a genuine interest in the vocation.

    If (for example) civil engineering was paying better and did not provide too much of a challenge during the job, the same kids would opt for civil engineering sooner than CS. Aptitude and ambition rarely come into the picture.

    --

    Today we have a large number of CS graduates who are not fit to be employed without at least 2 months of training. More than that we have many non CS graduates who have taken 6-24 month "professional computer training" courses that attempt to teach them several computer languages. While these people manage to "learn" the languages, they still dont know how to program. The desire to do as little as possible to get the job and keep it shows itself right from the school/college level.

    The approach to the professional training is similar to what they did in school and college and while they have many certificates showing how well they did back then, their work rarely reflects the grades.

    Now I'm not sure how academia works in the West, and I feel it can't be too different, but I have worked with a few USA and UK programmers employed by our clients, and I can say that even the ones who did not have professional or academic CS training had a much more professional outlook and approach than the CS graduates and double graduates that I have worked with. This is the main reason why I feel it has more to do with vocational guidance than "just the way schools work here".

    Today getting an MBA is the guarantee to the highest paying jobs, and getting a CS/IT related MBA is the most sought after educational qualification.

    I know that I have made generalizations and I want to clarify that I am not exaggerating anything. When I say most, I really mean most. Of the ~100 local programmers I have worked with, less than 10 were actually interested in knowing how to do their job. 6 of these are now abroad. One is working for Yahoo India. Most (sorry) of the rest are still with the same company they were with when I first met them. I didn't find the Paula "Brillant" WTF as funny as the people who commented on it. Accepting a job without knowing how to do it, not admitting failure, endless excuses and hemming and hawing over delays is kind of standard procedure for some people here. They will switch jobs before they get fired, and keep them till their seniors start complaining.

    Of the ~40 US/UK and IT professionals I have worked with, 3 were self declared hobbyists who learned a bit of PHP over a few weekends. Only one IT dude (a system admin, not a programmer) was stuck up and refused to fix simple issues like updating the connection string in the web.config file without us sending a complete new "package" containing all the site files, a db dump, and the updated web.config file. And I am inclined to chalk that incident up to policy rather than a fear of breaking the unknown.

    I am not sure if this answers your queries, but I have done my best to analyse the situation. It's not very easy to do for me because I live here and much of this is not exceptional unless seen from an outsider's point of view.

    If you have any more questions, feel free to ask.

    DesignSpatial:
    spathi-wa,

    Your post provides some good insights on how those who are asking for "teh codez" do their work. It's certainly a different way of working than most of us in the West are familiar with.

    Is what you describe a stereotype, or is this truly the way that many coders work there? If it's the norm, what do you think the causes are for it? Is it the corporate culture, or the teaching methods in the school system, or is it the business models of particular companies? Does this mode of working extend to other occupations? I'd be interested in hearing your views on this.

    Jon.

    spathi-wa:
    Tei:
    You can send SMS messages trough email. is called email2sms gateways. Are paid servides.

    (quote snipped, find the post here )

    I have found this practice disturbing and felt cheated every time someone got promoted over me, knowing exactly how well the person could actually do his/her job without a bunch of plagiarized functions and sample code.

    Thank you dailyWTF for the opportunity to vent.

  • CogDissident (unregistered) in reply to robaker

    I see a forum experiment coming on...

  • Zack (unregistered) in reply to robaker
    robaker:
    If someone were to post some malicious 'codes' in response, how many of them would just paste it in and run it?

    Ha. Most of them.

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