I would love to include a third guy with what you mentioned, but
when I am comparing between A and B, I am taking out the most
obvious pros and cons of A and B. It's to prove a point rather than
putting down either of them. When you ask someone if they prefer
apple or orange, the person will likely consider why they want
apple or why they prefer orange, of course the person can always
say they prefer pineapple, but that's not the point of the
question. That's why I did not include the third guy. The essence
is in the question, the choices are the parameters, it's not the
background by which the question itself should be based upon.
You do have valid points when you said what you wrote, and I am
sure some share your sentiments, if not many. The reason what
prompts me to wrote what I did, is after my experiences with
working with different levels of people. I have the priviledge of
working with really smart people with really high education and
some really stupid people with even higher paper qualifications.
I'm not talking about degrees here, I'm also talking about Masters
(can you believe it!!), occassionally me and my friends from the
same company will go dinner together and we talk about if these
people bought their certificates. For example, I was asking this
lady to create a database for the company, she had just graduated
from her Masters programme and recently joined my company, guess
what, the database ended up named "Example". So imagine the horror
when the programmers go to code the files and put things like,
"Connection.Open Example", or during a meeting, the programmers
say, "You need to connect to example, then retrieve the records
from Example...". Fortunately, some guy informed us and we managed
to put things back in order. In my post, I was merely comparing
hands on experience with paper qualifications, and because I have
experienced lots of horror stories before that's what prompts me to
think differently now. When someone tells me they have a high
education, I'm no longer taking for granted that he is more capable
than anybody else.
Another example, one day the company's website was hacked. And of
course, the boss is extremely frantic about it. Fortunately, the
hacker was a security administrator, employed by a third party
client to test the security of the system, so not much damage was
done but because the hacker was not employed by us, they refuse to
reveal on the system loophole. In any case, the boss got all the
programmers to check on the problem. There were about 8
programmers, out of whom, 5 had degrees, 1 Masters student and 2
were diploma qualified. In the end, the diploma guy saved the day
and emerged the hero. When asked how he knew how to resolve the
hacking issue, he just casually mentioned he has experience this
before. By right, everyone expect the degree programmers to lead by
example, but in this case, reality has proven the common sense may
not be so common afterall.
Of course if you ask me, to choose between a Ph.D student or a PSLE
student, assuming both had nil experience, I would likely go for
the Ph.D student, it would have been a better bet, but that's not
my question if you read my post carefully. My question is comparing
abilities and paper qualifications, that's my point mainly. Once
again, I wrote what I did, not because I did it for fun, but it's
partly due to the comedies that happened before, and I still laugh
about it today.
