

The Computer Science Program in Singapore: Where innovation is marked down. - nubela

Good evening HN:)<p>I'd like to share a snipplet of life as a computer science undergrad in National University of Singapore. A little background information:<p>Last semester before my stint as an intern at Videoplaza (hey guys!:D), I took up a course known as Software Engineering. Microsoft kinda sponsored the course. It was a 8 modular credit course, that meant an equivalent of 2 normal courses. That made this a huge course. The course scope was well, basically, for teams to put software engineering skills into practise. Iterative programmiing, revision control, software architectural design. You get the gist. The course requirement was for teams to engage software engineering skills to develop a file syncing tool, with C#.<p>Well, as a full time Archlinux user, I hated that I had to code a full app for a platform I don't even use. I was the leader of my team, and with a little bit of persuasion, I managed to convince my team to go with Mono, and to develop the app to work cross-platform. While everyone was working with WPF, .NET, blabla. My team did some crazy stuff like using SVN to sync files (instead of writing our own backend for syncing), GTK for GUI, iKVM to use SVNKit in Mono, blabla. It was a hell of a course, but we managed to pull through, and our plan to re-use open-sourced components meant we could focus on features, and learning new frameworks. Also, how cool would it be to go rogue on a Microsoft sponsored course?<p>My team won 2nd place when M$ came down to reviewed the apps after they were done. However, the team was awarded B+ as a grade, and myself, as a A+ only because my peers graded me highly on a peer review appraisal. It bothered me. The code wasn't that bad (review it at http://code.google.com/p/subsynct/), we met with some serious obstacles and overcome it anyways, and within a tight timeframe. I was proud of the result, and of my team's effort.<p>It made no sense to me how my team only deserved a B+.<p>And so after months of back-headed nagging, I shot an email to my professor for some clarifications: http://pastebin.com/APXEcFG4<p>Here is his reply: http://pastebin.com/paMntaY2<p>And heres my final reply: http://pastebin.com/DHSt1dkg<p>---<p>Just an example of how innovation is discouraged and frowned upon in an Asian context. One of the main reasons why technology entrepreneurial activities is in such a poor state in Singapore.<p>PS: Don't use the app, it was a proof-of-concept. SVN really suck balls in performance for binary files. We learnt this the hard way.
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RobGR
Professor Damith seems rather reasonable in this correspondence, and I don't
think you are providing any evidence that "innovation is marked down."

Damith points out that your grade is based on the product, not the process,
because he can't measure that; a good product is a proxy for what must be a
good process. He might have added, that in the real world only the product
matters, and if a process was against all rules of Software Engineering and
produced a better product, then the rules of Software Engineering would be
rewritten.

It is very hard to rate or grade programmers. If you continue in the business
you will soon find yourself attempting it, when you interview people to select
your employees or your boss. If you can come up with any good ways of doing
this, you will go far :)

When it comes to "how innovation is discouraged and frowned upon in an Asian
context", I would suggest that the quickest way to find anti-innovation
sentiment is by looking at any large bureaucratic institution or company, not
by looking at ethnicity or region. I recommend to you the book "The
Organization Man" by William Whyte, particularly the chapter "The Fight
Against Genius". You may find it resonates with your experiences.

