The IT services sector is booming again(after the dot com burst) & the companies are coming up everywhere to milk the opportunities that lay there for the skilled & daring. The already established companies began hiring again, breathing a new hope in those looking for jobs in this sector as well as in the freshers and students already studying & preparing to take their place in the IT sector!! One of the sub-sectors here is the web enabled services, the designing of web applications and their development to be precise, or as one can say in common tongue, website design and development.
The web design & development sub-sector of the IT industry is probably one of the most saturated ones today(or it seems). There are just too many companies and individuals offering these services to potential(gullible?) clients that its impossible to even take a close estimate of their number. The simple reason being that a high-school kid armed with a copy of Microsoft FrontPage or any other WYSIWYG HTML editor can claim be a web designer. Hotscripts and other such free script directories allow them to proclaim themselves as web developers.
But is it really all there to it? 😕
Certainly not!! These kids are out for a few extra bucks to pocket for their pocket expenses, maybe take a girlfriend or two out for a slice of pizza and a shake!! But having a prejudice against them is cetainly not a wise thing to do. Just because they are school/college kids doing websites on the side for some extra pocket money doesn’t mean there can’t be any gems in the lot. Some of them are really talented with their skills scoring much higher than the rest of their fellows.
Just like any other industry, there are heavyweights here as well. But some wise guy said:
don’t judge a book by its cover
And that’s quite true. So like every other industry, there’s no lack of bullshitters here as well. Be it a big company or a small startup, bullshitters are everywhere and they can be anyone, because they don’t have a caste or creed. Till sometime back, an ad appeared regularly in the classifieds section of Hindustan Times from a guy looking for some freshers to take on as trainees. That guy claimed to have 23 years experience in web-designing using Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Dreamweaver and Flash. 😯 Now ofcourse one who doesn’t know anything about this industry would be very impressed by this guy’s experience, afterall that guy claims to have 23 years experience!! But someone who has even basic knowledge about the industry would know that the guy was just bullshitting, nothing more. 23 years experience indeed, I don’t know about Adobe Photoshop but Macromedia surely would’ve loved to know how that guy got hold of a copy of Dreamweaver & Flash even before they both were a concept or even before Macromedia came into being I should say. 🙄 And that guy was surely not designing websites for the internet on this planet we know as Earth, because if my memory serves me right, the world wide web came into existence in the early 1990s and so did the first internet browser(was it Mosaic?), before that the internet was just like any other network where you would communicate via terminal and console windows in a character user interface!! So either he was in contact with some aliens who were outsourcing their work to him or as I very much believe, he was bullshitting right through his shorts!!
But then this is not a one off incident. You’ll find some so called companies bullshitting in a much similar way. Many a times I’ve come across the websites of these web design/development companies who claim to have experience which greater than the number of years world wide web has been around. And you’ll find some to proudly mention the year of their inception and yet when you do a bit of research you’ll find that their company domain was registered many years after their supposed inception. Now I don’t say there can’t be a legit reason for it, there can, and I’ll come to it in a moment. Just as I was browsing around yesterday, I came across a website of a supposedly big web design/development company. Apparently they’ve done a number of websites for some big corporates but then that doesn’t mean they are big-shots or can’t bullshit. Ofcourse they can as I found out after going through the company profile as made available on their website. They claimed to have over 30 years of experience in the web-services industry!! 😯 Now that really rates!! 🙄 And their inception year was of 1998, but doing a whois on their company domain shows that it was registered in 2001. Surprise surprise!! 🙄 Was the company so low hung that it couldn’t afford to get their own domain name before being three years in the industry? Ofcourse there’s a possibility that they might’ve changed the domain name in 2001, quite unusual but still not something that’s never been done before. However, the company would still keep their old domain name & redirect it to the new one, anyone having a little sense would do it, unless they just simply didn’t want to associate the old domain with themselves due to any unpleasant turn of events like blacklisting or anything else. But again, I very much doubt it, since someone claiming to have more than 30 years of experience surely wouldn’t make this mistake!! 🙄 So another bullshitter in their vast global community!!
Where does this all leads to? Nowhere? I’m not raising a finger on their skill. That 23years experienced guy might be good in designing & so can this 30+ years experience company, but the question is afterall different, the bullshit that they dish out to the gullible. I can recall an incident from my past on this as well.
Back in the days when I used to just freelance, I was working on a website of a big school and one day I was supposedly giving a presentation of some of the sample layouts for the website. The audience included the principal, the head of computer department, and one two board members, and some big shot supposedly from USA. No one but that visiting hot-shot from US was criticising my work to all ends, keeping on ranting whatever was coming to his mind(if he had one which I very much doubted). The principal, it seemed, dared not do anything but agree with him. That guy was teaching me how I should do my job, now I wouldn’t have objected to that had the guy known what he was talking about, but he ranted on that he’s in the industry before I was even born, that he’s been in the IT industry since 1971!! All this attitude was starting to burn me all over & I held back my retort with a lot of difficulty. Instead of him taunting about him not becoming a hotshot near enough Bill Gates when he had a head start on him of about 3 years, I simply & politely said that he might’ve been in the IT industry since 1972 but he’s certainly not been in the web-services industry that long!! But that reply of mine simply burnt into his ego. After much bitching on my rudeness & even calling me an inexperienced script kiddie(I’d been in the industry for almost 3 years at that time), he simply dismissed all of the layouts, and the school principal I think had no choice but to agree with him, apparently he was too big a hot-shot for principal to disagree with. 🙄
So sometimes I just wonder why people bullshit so much about their experience in the IT industry? Or is it same with every other industry? I doubt that this is exclusive to the IT sector, but then due to a lack of knowledge about this industry in common man, it does seem that the number of people bullshitting here is greater than any other, coupled with the fact that its a booming industry as well, attracting more bullshitters!! 🙄