The Real Transformers

Have you watched the movie Transformers yet? If not, please do. It's a great movie. Have you seen the real transformers before? If not, watch this movie clip:

The Cheapest Way Of Making Long Distance Call

I would like to share my experience of using the cheapest way to make long distance call. When I was in US for the past 2 months, I called back home and I called my gf almost everyday. The duration of each call is more than 45 mitutes. But it only cost me 10 Euro Dollar (about RM 46.65) to make all these calls, I mean all calls between the 2 months time during I was in US. /hmm

The way that to do this, is to use VoipBuster, a VOIP service provider which is similar to Skype, but cheaper. The reason that I choose VoipBuster, is simply because it's free to call from PC to Malaysia land-line (provided you have some credit in it's account). So what I did is I bought the minimum amount of credit which is 10 euro dollars (RM 46.65), and start calling back to Malaysia land line for free. The 10 euro dollar credit will not be deducted by calling Malaysia land-line, so I can use them to call Malaysia mobile phone line which cost o.o4 EUR (RM 0.19) per minute. Of course, there needs to be an Internet connection to use this service, and the hotel that I stayed includes free Internet connection.. /XD

The only drawback though, is that there will be some delay (about 1 to 1.5 seconds) when talking through VoipBuster, but is acceptable to me. So if you need to travel to other country for a long period of time and you want to call your girlfriend or boyfriend or mother or father or whoever everyday, try this method.

Why A Career In Computer Programming Sucks

I read an article titled Why a career in computer programming sucks recently. The author has given some interesting points in the article. Worth a read for anyone in software industry. I personally do not agree with some of the points in the article. Here I list down the summary of the article in point form, and my comment (in italic) on each of them.

• Computer programming is a job that’s heavily dependent on temporary knowledge capital. The programming languages and tools that a programmer use to carry out his job keeps changing. In other profession (e.g. lawyer, accountant, etc.), the knowledge capital increases as you grow older, and employers are willing to pay you higher for the knowledge that you have accumulated through experience. But it's different story for a programmer. There's not much advantage for a 60-year-old .NET programmer have over a 27-year-old .NET programmer as both of them will have at most 5 years of .NET progrmming experience.
  
  Not agree - It's true that programming languages and tools keeps changing. But it doesn't matter. The career path for most programmers typically looks like this:

  Entry -> Technical (pure programming) -> Technical (more on system architecture design & analysis) -> Management (Project management) -> Higher Management (Managing people, department budget,headcount,etc..).

  I don't believe that any employer will expect to see a 60-year-old guy, with 30 over years of programming experience, applying for an analyst programmer kind of job.
  

• Computer programming is a low prestige profession. Compare with other professions such as law, finance, and medicine, computer programmers are treated as a profession with lower status in society. In US, any computer science person are socially classified as geek/nerd.
  
  Agree - I am a programmer myself, and luckily we are not being called as nerd here in Malaysia. But it's true that in most people's mind, a programmer is definitely not a high prestige profession compare to a doctor or a lawyer. In fact, Malaysia government universities only let those with superb result in SPM/STPM (Malaysia Standard High School Certificate) to enter the faculty of medicine; while any student with average result can easily get into Computer Science faculty.. I think this would be one of the reason that people look at programmer as a lower status profession compare to doctor/lawyer. But let's think about this: who's the richest man in the world, and what industry is he in? /wahaha
  

• It's a worldwide trend that computer programming industry is starting to be outsourced to countries with cheaper labour cost, especially India. Programmers from the developed countries such as US are losing their job because of this.
  
  Agree - Yes, computer programming is moving toward this trend especially for developed countries such as USA. Malaysia is probably one of the country with cheap programmer which takes away job from US programmers. But if the trend continue this way, I am sure that one day, probably 20 or 30 years from now, computer programming jobs will start to flow away from Malaysia to other countries which are even cheaper.
  

• Because of the temporary knowledge capital for computer programming, older programmer will start facing problem when they no longer know how to use the latest and supposedly greatest programming tools. The only way out is to start moving from technical to project management role. But there's a problem with this situation. Many employers aren’t interested in having an ex-computer programmer to become the project manager. They would seek for someone with Project Management certification and years of experience in project management to hold the project manager position.
  
  Partially agree - It's true that employers start hiring non-IT background people to manage IT project. In fact, there are CIO from some big companies that have no IT background. But this is only a small population in IT industry. I believe that one with IT background is still a better candidate for a position like IT project manager. i.e. When a user/customer is requesting for something that is technically impossible/extremely difficult to be done, an IT project manager, with many years of programming experience, will be able to suggest an alternate or even a better way of doing it. A non-IT-background folk will not be able to provide such value. Worse still, when it comes to dealing with the programmers of his own team, how can a non-IT-background folk tells when his programmer is taking months to accomplish some simple programming task that can be done in 5 minutes?
  

• The working conditions sucks. Computer programmers are cubicle employees. It's almost impossible for them to have their own private office. Besides that, employers often are not willing to invest in proper tools for computer programmers. Computers provided are usually not good enough for programmers to carry out their job efficiently.
  
  Agree - A programmer will never have a good reason to convince the employer to give him a private office, just to do programming. But I believe this applies not only to programmer. Most of the white-colar worker nowadays are buried in the cube farm.
  

Of all the points above, none of them really makes the career in computer programming sucks. It sucks only if you are a programmer who doesn't like programming.