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by mbenjaminsmith
5644 days ago
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Software as we all know it today is inseparable from the internet. Like a lot of learning or information exchange on the interent, it's largely a peer-to-peer activity (software being the exemplary). Academia is hierarchical and relies on a specialist gathering, filtering and preparing information to disseminate to many. The former is more error-prone but also much faster. Or another way to look at it: If young John Resig builds a tool that will save you time, should you wait for your professor to learn about it and teach you or learn about it from John himself? I'm not knocking academia (there's a lot of theoretical work going on in CS that's invaluable to the industry), but your professor is professional educator, not a professional programmer, so her needs and your needs (to have the right tools to build things competitively) are not perfectly aligned. In many fields the difference is probably inconsequential, but in something as rapidly changing as software I think it makes all the difference. I've seen the effects of this lag in a different way living in Thailand. Since most of the developers here do not learn English well enough to work/research in the language, they're ability to learn new technologies is slowed waiting for the handful of bilingual developers that exist to learn them and then blog about them in Thai. The effect is that the technology base here is horribly outdated. New products are built aggressively, but they're almost all built on yesterday's tech. (The formal education system here is notoriously bad, but that's a different story.) |
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If you come to the Thai market with knowledge of technologies that allow you to execute better and faster than the locals, you might have an advantage.