I remember the time, somewhere between eleven and twelve years ago, when I went from being a supposed "excellent scholar" at school to just another student struggling under the weight of expectation that the aforementioned image had created. The expectation from not just family, friends and peers, but from my own self. It was the last two years of school and it were these that would determine whether or not us students would make it to the elite colleges in the country for our higher education, that, in turn, would facilitate a life of economic comfort and social security. In most middle-class households in India we hold the belief that an education is worthy only if it were a "brand".
Not only did we all need to prepare for our school and board examinations but also for a slew of entrance tests for the different institutions that we were aspiring to be in. This is, where I believe, the fundamental issue began. We moved away from what we wanted to do and concentrated on where it is that we were expected to be. I was preparing for my Medical and Engineering entrances, whereas, just a year before, my favorite subject had been Economics. It was a dispassionate race to an end that we did not comprehend beyond the ill-conceived precedence set by our immediate social constructs.
A very important thing went missing as we rushed towards our deluded dreams - the spirit of inquiry. No one around me was questioning anymore. We were reading text books, memorizing equations and doing complex math. But none of it translated to any meaningful recognition of the significance of the subject matter outside of its relation to our immediate academic needs. I had problems with any learning that involved not having answers. As a result I was still asking questions about Physics, Chemistry, Math and Biology that to others seemed trivial and unnecessary. A burden that was not required at such a pivotal time in our lives. We were preparing for examinations and all that was needed were epigrammatic solutions to the specific types of problems that would appear in them. Many of my peers took to this in comfort and were able to deliver results with great elan. But I was slipping. In my quest for semantics, I was falling behind the others academically. For me, the "what" and "how" were mere facilitators - the "why" was of far greater intrigue. And I could not recover.
Fast forward to the present, and I am still plagued by the same curiosity that took me through a relatively ordinary higher education and to the job that I find myself in today. During my college years I got better at accepting that knowledge and academics would not, always, go hand-in-hand. The problem is time. I gradually understood that to acquire any significant depth in every subject I was studying would be an impossible task as every curriculum is strictly bound in time (and necessarily so). However, I was determined to know as much as I could about all the subjects I found a deep interest in. In those, I was still asking the difficult question, "why?". Finding answers was up to me. And me, alone.
The situation eases out as we step into our work lives. I am a web developer / IT consultant with a multi-national corporation. My area of focus is far more localized. I find it a simpler task now to ask myself all that I must to understand what it takes to be a web developer. I primarily work on Microsoft's .Net stack and each day I try and delve deeper into the meaning of the code I write. Implementation is extremely important in terms of client deliverables. Deadlines must be met, and targets achieved. Unlike my last days at school, I've been very effective at this. But timelines have not deterred me from striving to form a deep understanding of the underlying principle of web development, the reason for the existence of new web technologies as we know them, and to comprehend why we write code the way we do. Once again, syntax is a mere facilitator. However important its role in project implementation, one must reason that its existence is governed by the semantics that give it meaning. By metaphorical license I extend the word semantics to include the philosophy behind the existence of all that is.
But the same idea does not apply to the majority of the IT gentry that I have had the opportunity to work with. There is little interest in further scrutiny beyond basic execution by rote. The most deliberation on code that one will find will be in the event of the sudden discovery of a major bug in the developed application. The solution to such would involve little more than anonymous browsing of Stack Overflow (or some such) for answers to questions raised by others. Once a plausible solution is found on the web, the next steps involve the copying of code over to the project source and cursory testing to determine if the basic issue has been alleviated. I certainly am not opposed to such - I myself have found answers to many such problems on the web and have the community much to thank for. However, extracting solutions by hacking together code bits, although acceptable in critical situations, does demand a certain level of investigation into the problem itself and the underlying composition of its solution, even if post application.
I must, however, clarify that this is in no way a reflection of the effectiveness of these individuals in the work that they do. It is rather reminiscent of the dispassion which I spoke of earlier. Emotional dissociation from one's profession is an unfortunate, yet not uncommon, disposition among people. Professional and personal goals of many individuals, especially those doing nine-to-five IT jobs, are oft misaligned. This behavioral pattern is more prominent in large organizations, such as the establishment I have been working for over the last five years. I fear, that if such lackadaisical attitude is not objectively discouraged, its proliferation within the industry will adversely affect the quality of services that large IT companies provide. Not evaluating the implications of the code developed or being ignorant of the principles driving the technology being used, leads to a constantly widening gap between the programmer and program. This divide, though not apparent in structure, reveals itself in the form of a gradually thinning intellectual fabric.
How much do we really care? How many of us even make an attempt to acquaint ourselves with new tools and technologies pertinent to our daily work? It is easy to confer titles such as "Web Developer", ".Net Specialist", "Application Developer", etc. upon ourselves in accordance with positions we occupy in an organization by virtue of having a job. But to take cognizance of their meaning and do justice by them, takes more. How many of us have stopped to ask, "Well, how does that really work?".
I wonder if it all begins back then. All those years ago, scrambling to make choices steeped in conformity. Do we need to re-structure our process of systematic instruction in education? Where do we begin inculcating that honesty? And how? For I see this as a systemic paradigm. And one with a deep semantic consequence.