End of the road

Well uni's over, results will be out soon. I'm sick and tired of this semester, so tired of studying. Not even sure if all this studying will pay off. I hate it how so many idiots are doing IT. WHY? God dammit so many of them are crap at what they do. Sometimes I really regret taking IT, I had all the academic ability in the world to take any field of study. Should have done something that's in demand worldwide. It's really depressing sometimes. If your field's not in demand it's really hard to distinguish yourself even if you're the best.

I just want to retire. Heck with the rat race.

Universities are a business, who gives a damn about teaching??

My thesis supervisor told me today that the university's cutting down courses and cutting down on the number of staff. She also told me that the Uni of Melbourne, not where I'm from, will be introducing a graduate program and will be cutting 10,000 students from its enrolment over the next 10 years. All the money that universities are getting are from doing research. It's true. That's what they are doing at QUT too, the dean sacked half of his staff and hired researchers instead. Not people who are good at teaching, but people who can actually bring money into the uni! So no one cares about teaching anymore. You can be the lousiest teacher but the university will hire you as long as you can bring in research grants. Kind of a sad state to be in, I thought you go to uni to learn, but apparently not, you just contribute to their business and maybe you'll learn something along the way! No wonder so many uni lecturers are crap. There's absolutely NO incentive to teach. You don't even get paid additional to teach a subject. And hear this, if you've been selected to teach, you can actually PAY OUT a figure of 16K AUD to the university so that they hire someone else from outside the uni to teach the subject.

It'll be interesting to see what happens in the next few years. People will go to uni but they'll be complaining that the lecturers are all crap. No wonder we get people who know crap who work in "the real world", because the lecturers teaching them are crap in the first place.

According to dictionary.com, a university is

1. An institution for higher learning with teaching and research facilities constituting a graduate school and professional schools that award master's degrees and doctorates and an undergraduate division that awards bachelor's degrees.

I emphasize higher learning. Now if lecturers who can't teach, tech, then students learning will be impeded. Which is really a bureaucracy. Perhaps this should be changed to "An insitution for RESEARCH, with learning an afterthought and fueled by bureaucracy and business driven purposes".

Sad sad sad...

Thoughtworks

So this other company called thoughtworks is interviewing me. Apparently if you don't have more than 2 years of "real work experience" in a large commercial environment, you get placed in their graduate program and spend 6 weeks in India on their training program. They also say that they hire the smartest and brightest, however this blog post indicates otherwise.

http://www.pyrasun.com/mike/mt/archives/2005/04/23/18.29.03/index.html

Not sure if I want to work for them now, and there's no way that I'm working for a starting grad salary, no way. I like it where one person said "They helped develop me, a 22 year-old kid fresh out of college with little more than two semesters of programming under his belt." Surrounded by idiots or newbs is the last thing I want to be doing.

Interviews

Today I had the longest interview with Redhat, whom headhunted me recently. 2 days ago I had an hour long interview over the phone and today, I had an interview that went well over 3 hours in person, in fact it was close to 3 1/2. 4 different people interviewed me. It took such a long time I thought it was going to go on forever. Some of the questions I felt were strange. Like how many cars are in Australia, how many company cars are in Australia and how many buses. I'm assuming that's how they think about your problem solving and creative process but I felt it was stupid. Anyway... I did alright I think, except I buggered up the reverse linked list question, but I figured it out in the end. I'm still not sure if I should do it though. Apparently many engineers work overtime and I'll hate that. I like to put in my 100% during office hours and after that it's enough, I don't want to live in work (unless it's my own thing.. of course). We'll see if I get it or not. But it's no biggie if I don't. Not to say I was trying not to get it, cos I am still interested in it but I want to learn as much as I can. If I can't learn or if it's not interesting there's no point in doing it.