Actors and Warriors: Theatrics and Bloodshed

If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.
—Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I recently came across an article of Stephen Cuunjieng on Manila Times titled Where Are Quality Finance and Tech Jobs Going? (Not Here). Here are my thoughts about it.

The tech industry is vast, so I’m going to limit my remarks to the software industry since that’s where I am in.

I have been in the software industry for thirty years already. I started long before it was even remotely called «Tech». I have seen fads go up and down. I have witnessed how things have evolved through the course of those years. I now head my own startup, partly as a response to what I’ve been seeing in the country; partly due to patriotism. There are many reasons why the tech jobs are not here in the Philippines. Some say economic reasons; some would say social reasons. We can point our fingers in all directions. We can keep blaming the government, schools, and private companies. But no matter how much we do that, it still avoids the true cause—the love for mediocrity.

When I was trying to break into the scene in the mid 90s, I was just a boy with passion. Access to sophisticated machines was difficult. Access to time resources was even more difficult. There was no Internet back then. So, how did I learn? I spent a lot of time in public libraries, reading whatever I can get my hands on, learning as much as I can. I did odd jobs just so I can have enough fare and food to spend time in the those libraries. When dial-up internet access became available, I would set aside a measly amount of money from my school allowance, just so I would have enough time to sit down in public terminals for 15 minutes. That was more than enough time for me to download articles and store them into my 360 KiB floppy disk. Fifteen minutes back then felt like forever. The world was my oyster. It was exhilarating. I learned the art of teaching myself.

Not long after, I had my first real job. I became a technician, web developer, and graphic artist, all rolled into one. I have to thank the people who supported and believed in me that time. Every day that I went to work was blissful. The little salary that I got was nothing compared to what I was learning. The difficulty of having to travel long distances in hot, noisy, and uncomfortable buses under the scorching heat of the sun, just to deliver pieces of hardware to a client was nothing. The ability to write source code to test out my ideas and hypotheses was worth everything.

I went to college, briefly, but left soon after. I thought at that time that it has got to be one of the worst things to do if one wants to be come a Software Engineer. I still believe that, to this day. The highest formal education attainment that I got is High School. I have no idea where my diploma is, nor do I care about it. In that single semester of college, I failed all computer-related subjects. Discussions about CPU scheduling bored me. Lectures about computer programming felt so heavy and tedious. It wasn’t fun, at all. It was drudgery. And so, I was there, sitting in the middle of the class, listening to the incoherent babble of the instructor, when I finally decided to quit. I surrendered my class cards to my professors, one by one, and told them I’m quitting. I was 16 at that time.

During the start of my career, I have been lucky enough to work with and be mentored by scientists, engineers, and researchers from Coordinated Science Lab at the University of Illinois, École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Carnegie Mellon University. I learned that the world out there is much bigger. I discovered that there are countless ways to do things. I found the real magnitude and power of CS with them. I also had the privilege of arguing and debating with them, over things as trivial as missing commas, and things as important as understanding intelligence.

I believe, to this day, that for the most part, universities and colleges are not equipped to teach students how to write high quality software. Most, if not all, instructors are not part of the software industry so what they’re teaching are not based on practical approaches. Most of the subject matter are also obsolete. A lot of the lessons being taught are for the masses outside. The programming languages taught in universities are inferior compared to industry standards. The depth and breadth of the subjects are pitiful. A lot of what’s happening inside are guesswork. Students graduate knowing nothing and render themselves being completely unhirable.

Not too long ago, I have encountered things that seemed unreal, but were real. One of those university programs is called «Operating Systems». I was impressed at first that these schools offered them. However, upon closer examination, I discovered that students are taught to just use simulated tools to understand how systems work. They are not taught how machines work. They are not taught how basic computer circuitry works. They are not taught how do bootloaders work. They are not even taught how to use the command line to execute basic commands. These institutions do not have the slightest clue of the true culture of real Computer Science (CS). They see the education program as just using computers for applied usage in trivial domains.

Soon after, I discovered that it was just the tip of the iceberg. Under programs that are labeled «Software Engineering», I discovered that the professors and instructor have not written real software, aside from «Hello World» programs. Students are given trivial tasks to complete, in order to pass a subject. What’s worse are these things «Hackathons» or whatever they’re called now. People really believe that you can find true engineering skills with events like those. The situation before, when I was 16 years old, and the situation now, are still very much the same. Nothing has changed. There are no schools in the Philippines with Software Engineering programs that are globally-competitive.

Here’s the twist with CS: no amount of skills and technical proficiency from other fields of study can prepare you for it. Your 99% grade in school will not translate to usable and practical software. The certificates that you got will not equate to a single line of code. CS is a discipline in its own right. It is so vast that it permeates every aspect of modern society now. It is so pervasive that you have to intentionally be an ascetic in order to ignore it. Understanding algorithms and data structures requires a different kind of thinking not present in other fields.

For the past decade, I have been trying so hard to restrain myself to comment on a subtopic—orators. During the past decade, I have seen an influx of conferences, seminars, and symposia about «Technology», «Trends», etc. What’s egregious is that the main people talking about those topics know nothing about those things. I somehow always find myself in uncomfortable situations wherein I ask the expert, directly, questions about what he presented, sometimes during the presentation, more often, after. I thought that politicians are good at dodging questions that are sensitive in nature. But lo and behold, I soon discovered that the orators are actually better at it.

Then, there are the outlanders. These people have no real interest with CS, have no technical proficiencies, and have nothing to contribute to the discussion. The most interaction they have with machines was playing videogames. These are the people that make a lot of noise on social media. They talk about the latest trends. They talk about Web 3.0, Cybersecurity, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, NFT, Artificial Intelligence, and just about any space that they want to hop on. The amount of publicity that they have is inversely proportional to the amount of technical knowledge they have over those domains. Some of them are real estate agents, practicing lawyers, bankers, accountants, civil servants, and the run-of-the-mill enthusiasts. At best, they’re just operators.

In any kind of market, there are different kinds of players. In a free market, specifically, every participant is given a chance to make it big. One of most important driving forces in a free market is competition as framed and determined by supply and demand. The orators and outlanders have nothing to contribute. They eat up the valuable space for aspiring players. They hog discussions about inventions and innovations. They appear in mainstream media with microphones. They lobby in the senate. They pump more and more air to benefit only themselves. They don’t really care about economic growth.

In a recent post that I made online, I said this, «When somebody claims that they’ve been in the software industry for a long time, my immediate instinct is to look for their credentials—open source code or technical articles. The absence of those is the absence of credibility.» A lot of the responses talked about NDAs and some such. Now, if I had to explain every nuance of that statement, for every case, it would already become too lengthy. There was no need for me to mention that there exists sensitive government contracts, private records, and classified projects. There are also very good engineers that are just not social enough, for them to justify sharing their work to the public. There are also prolific engineers who run their entire enterprises but contribute zero to the open source community. My former mentor is one of them. For the rest, however, what I said applies.

To form a new software company—a startup even—you have two paths: 1) You’re already an engineer, and you want to create a team that would address your target markets; or 2) You’re not an engineer, and you want to hire people that will form your engineering team. In both cases, you have to know how the software industry works. There are no excuses. If you will solely rely on advisers to tell you how to run the company; how to respond to crises; how to talk to engineers; and how to market and sell then products, then your runway will be very short. Unlike other industries, the software world changes at a weekly pace. Yes, I’m not exaggerating. So your knowledge about things a few months ago, may soon become obsolete the next thing you try to apply it. If you believe the use of contemporary AI systems like generative artificial intelligence will help, then you are most welcome to try to find out things for yourself, or your company.

One of the reasons why Philippines is absent in the map for foreign investors with regards to software production is because there’s nothing to invest on. The quality of the software is poor. The tools are mediocre. The programming languages used are the ones that are popular on TIOBE. The engineers are from bootcamps. Collectively, this results to inflation of perceived value. It gives the impression of the ability to produce, even if there’s none. Economically, this is net negative. TAMs are imaginary. It’s a lose-lose situation. When you see however, software that is being «developed» by a company, in the Philippines, expect it to be outsourced from other countries. You know what those countries are. You know where the money will flow to.

Software companies don’t strive to provide challenge. They see software as just a means to an end, not an end in itself. Executives follow the latest news and trends, closely, and decide their next major technical stack overhaul based on what they saw. Most software companies, ironically, do not have what they call the «hacker» culture. Hacker in this sense refers to the original meaning in the MIT AI Lab—A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. What is present nowadays are depressed employees typing manically with their keyboards in desperate attempts to produce something useful.

I have always had the option of just observing things from afar and minding my own business. However, Taleb’s words sowed seeds of actions in me. My company and I decided to rise up to the challenge and solve the problems that we are good at solving—the technical ones. And even in the midst of the noise, chatter, and nonsense, we strive to contribute to the welfare the society, albeit in baby steps. We also do our best to contribute to the community by giving away some of our key software components, free, gratis, libre. On the social side of things, we also do our best, to educate people—both young and old—about the basics, nuances, techniques, and methods that can be used to survive the rapidly changing tech scene.