Effective Use Of Business Technology

What if, I told big IT firms that I will sue them or probably ask their clients to sue them for copyright infringement or source code theft?

What if, I tell Indian It companies that their HR manager needs to be fired for recruiting bad software engineers?

What if, I comment that all software companies in India should not be the chosen destination for software outsourcing?

I know that many people would be angry with me for making such comments, considering that fact that I am a computer engineer from India and I work in the IT field. Before I get negative reactions, here is a story I need to tell you. This is not a hyped up or made up story. For the sake of privacy, I will have the names changed though.

I am a computer engineer and studied in one of the most famous and reputed private engineering colleges in India. I got through merit and was allotted a government seat due to my rank in the entrance examination. I am happy with my choice because I love computers and they have been my passion for so long.

In my last year of engineering, I met a lecturer who recently joined our college. While talking to her, I found out that she had been working with Wipro and resigned her job to teach in our college. Naturally I got curious and asked her the most famous, the most repeated question she might have heard.

Why did you leave the cushy, high paying, glamorous IT job and join our college?

The answer was obvious. She too entered engineering due to her parent’s pressure and passed out because she was good at mugging things up. After about 3 years working in the IT industry, she felt that it was not her cup of tea. I can’t agree more since you need to have a passion for your job to keep doing it. She felt the pressure of projects, deadlines, meetings everything beyond what she could cope up with. The real shock was not when she told me why she quit, but when she answered my question about her working environment there.

While talking, I casually asked her.

Hey Miss. How was the working experience here? Were you a coding guru? My friends have the issue of programming and they are tensed whether they can work in a corporate environment which requires coding, coding and more coding.”

She answered very casually and fast.

When there is Google why do we need to worry? All we do there is when we get a project, we search using Google to find out related code, replace it with our own variable names and present it to our team leader.

I  then asked her whether it works in all cases. She replied

Well, it works for almost all the projects we get. However there are some things that we can’t get right. We usually rely on the best coder in our team to do it while the rest of us Google to find something else.

To ensure this was not a standalone incident, I contacted several of my friends, relatives etc who were in the IT field asking for similar experiences. The result was shocking. Almost everyone replied this happens in their company most of the times. One person even said that they do freelance work this way.

This incident led me to think how businesses are conducted these days. IT companies charge huge amounts for getting projects done. Are they right in delivering products with copied code? Is it ethical that software’s built by them contains work done by others who are not properly credited or paid for it? Will this incident happen so frequently that the open nature of the web will make many people start software companies purely exploiting other peoples work?

Why Does this Happen?

It’s true. Most of my friends have problem with coding (Honestly me too, but I am not into the coding section anyway.) We find it really hard to pass the programming labs due to many reasons

1. The absence of good teachers who can really teach programming. If they can teach, they don’t know coding and if they know coding, they can’t teach.
2. Using outdated tools. Colleges in India sill rely on Turbo C++ as the environment for programming in C language. Those tools have been outdated for so long now and people rarely use them now.
3. Learning the things that are no longer necessary. Ask any coder whether they need to learn to create mouse clicks and those kinds of programs. They will ask you whether you live in a cave. The focus is on teaching things that are outdated rather than teaching things that are current.
4. The students have little basic understanding of the programming languages. It still amazes me when people who have passed out and have a computer engineer degree in their hands tell me that they can’t code a simple program that checks for palindrome.
5. More theory than practice. The structure of our educational system is something that is based more on theory rather than real life approach.

I do not believe that there are strict measures enforced by businesses to check the quality of the product they receive on the core level. The big name IT firms do not place checks for copyrighted information illegally obtained. One main reason I see this happening is because of the project deadlines being so tight and people not having enough time to do custom coding.

Google makes it so easy to obtain information based on anything. If Google does not give information people join programming forums and ask questions regarding this posing as creating software’s for projects or even learning purposes. The people on forums are usually nice people and they help out the answer seekers by either correcting the errors or even to the extent of writing the code for them.

How Can IT Companies Keep a Check on The Software’s Delivered?

People are paying for quality product and I believe every company has the responsibility to give the client the quality he pays for. The world is moving to reusable concept and the software firms can easily deploy such methods to reduce the time spent on projects.

Here are some things the IT firms can do to stop this

1. Allocate sufficient time for each project.
2. Increase the team size for projects if required.
3. Filter out people who are not employable as per industry standards.
4. Ensure that the code is clean and does not violate any copyrights. Hire a team to do this if required.
5. If the code needs to be used, ensure you have got the permission from the original author of that code.

What is your take on this issue? As a small business owner or even as a corporate leader do you think this issue is something that you need to worry about? Is the ethics of such practices justified? I’m all ears