A quiet month overall

It's been a quiet month overall. Quiet but rather busy. I have attended some four interviews for buisness schools, which is something rather sorry. You would have to be brainless, spineless and blind not to be able to see something painful in a thousand engineers go head to head for one management seat.

Why?

We create the largest educated work force in the world, and throw them at solving problems, that just stifle the same work force and cause them all to attempt to do something else, which they believe will be creative: a naivete which is charming till you realize that the whole thing is just a rehash of the emperor's new clothes.

I don't really belive that these engineering students, who wish to go to b-schools actually believe they will achieve their creative fulfillment by getting into management. Who are they fooling? Creativity is something that they have to achieve in their job, and I do not think even for a second that the IIM's, hallowed though they are, are in anyway teaching their students to go do something creative or constructive in their life. More so, I don't think the students themselves will dare enough to go do something creative or constructive in their life. Most of them just prefer to go get into the corporate rat race and just accrete in middle or upper management.

We don't innovate. What was the last product that India actually made? I disagree with Narayanamurthy and all the other old mules, who preach that service knowledge is a valuable asset. We need to balance our industry, not just have a services sector, but also a thriving innovative industrial workforce.

However most IT courses are a vocational course in Java and most management courses are a vocational course for McKinsey or investment banking. Yes! Other than the ISB there is not a single B school that even offers you a course in entrepreunership. Oh! Most schools have an entrepreneurship cell and funnily most students enter this course because they believe that this stint in an e-cell exhibits their latent entrepreneurial talent which any corporate welcomes. I know that sounds cynical but I am agog with wonder, when most corporates atleast bigwigs don't want entrepereneurs but managers.

I am actually quite sick of it all, and if some highbrow from IIM B can explain to me very patiently why he is adding to India's value by doing an MBA, or explain why parents tend to favour that course more than somebody who is trying to startup a company that atleast makes testing easier.

Btw, here is an idea for automating testing.

Build a tool that analyzes an exe and generates a literal xml representation of the gui. If for example the application has just a window which displays hello world, then we generate a xml window which states it has a window like this, and a css style stylesheet that specifies where the fonts go, what the fonts are, their sizes and everything else. This being an xml/css application validation would be simple. Plus the srs of the gui app can be just cast as xml and you can match them. Or you can just get the spec. team to mock up the gui and then save it as an xml file, and then we could just run a compare of both of them and we would have an answer as to whether the gui passes or not almost instantaneously.

We could also separate the functionality. The xml just access a func-call in a library, so we could separately test the library to see if it functions perfectly. I know such a system is going to be difficult to build if not to sandbox, but we would then have a solid base testing tool instead of a hundred million programmers. We could then just automate the tests better than WinRunner or SilkRunner which perform this by learning the app but require human interaction for learning about the app.


Ok just an idea, but what about it....

(Hope to write about a lot of stuff over the weekend. Hope I do it... :))