On Tue, 2 Sep 2008 03:41:54 -0700 (PDT), "xahlee@gmail.com"
gmail.com> wrote:

Actually, I've been personally acquainted with this problem and what
it entails, having worked for a short time as a liaison ("Project
Manager") between Japanese marketing personnel in Japan who didn't
speak English and Bangladesh PHP programmers in Bangladesh who spoke
very poor English.

One Bangladesh programmer who happened to be working locally in that
same office in Japan, when hearing of the problem of lack of learning
of new technologies, said that he thought that one solution was to
have programmers work in pairs, with one senior, experienced
programmer acting as a mentor to a junior programmer.

The problem with this approach is that it doesn't help much in
learning pioneer technologies; it only helps with technologies in
which the senior programmer already has some experience/knowledge.

To my astonishment, I once read somewhere that the average number of
programming language theory research papers that the average
programmer reads in a month is zero. At first, I couldn't believe
this. But having worked as a liaison between programmers and
marketing staff, I think it is quite true.

Most of the programmers whom I worked with were not interested in
programming theory, or even in programming per se, and spent most of
their free time in the office watching giant centipedes eating mice on
YouTube, chatting in Yahoo! Messenger, or sending e-mail. Once, I
tried discussing the Towers of Hanoi problem with one of them, and he
replied that it was "a very hard problem" in programming. I couldn't
believe this. Towers of Hanoi is a first-year student problem for
computer science students!

The problem seems to be one of lack of time and lack of interest. Most
programmers seem to be force-fed programming technologies that they
are not interested in, in a manner in which they are not allowed to
explore what is interesting about the topic. Therefore, they learn to
hate the topic, and proceed to spend all their free time trying to
forget about programming.

Curiosity is essential to learning, yet the environment does
everything it can to quash any potential curiosity. No wonder there
is no learning!

-- Benjamin L. Russell