Well, my favorite quote on research had been the one by Wernher von Braun- “Research is what I am doing when I do not know what I am doing”. On this, we can bring a corollary on the definition of Development which could be something like “Development is what I am doing when I perfectly know what I am doing”. R&D as we all know or assume, is the backbone of any successful knowledge cultivation organization.
Being a techie, I enjoy my designation as a software engineer, R&D division. Whew.., “So you do Research!” - asked one of my professor uncle! “Yes”, promptly the no non-sense engineer inside me replied, making me silent. So how many papers you have published, where and all?, IEEE, ACM ? This time the no non-sense engineer inside me and myself, both were silent!
Research what I am talking about is what research being done in Indian companies. The original research is actually never done in Indian companies. Research requires certain amount of basic knowledge at a very fundamental level, which the Indian techies forget the moment, they step out of their universities. And after years of confrontation with different customers, different projects, when you become a project leader or a project manager, you will find some scope for research, that too, when ordered by the top brass of the organization. Therefore the scope of research is often limited to that elite category which constitutes roughly 5% of organization, and rest of the people never do R&D even though they belong to R&D department. In fact they do is G&P, Google and Paste.
Google, as they say a noun which became a verb. Behind this huge success of this software industry, there is a little bit of google inside it. Google along with the Free Software Foundation brought a revolution in the software industry thus causing the so called ‘Death of the creative programmer”.
Today when my boss says, “Do some R&D on that”, all he/she means me to is do some google, see if any existing implementation is there, then try to develop a simple prototype, try to find an open source if available, and remember, don’t waste too much of time!
Interestingly, it works. Today efficient engineers are those who know how to use Google better. Now take for example, if you are told to write a simple hash function, unless that has some stringent requirement its better to google and paste than to try inventing one. This saves time as well. Not only small companies, but the so-called CMM-Level 5 companies R&D staff also do the same. Perhaps that’s what shows how mature in terms of capabilities they are?
The fact is that most of the companies can’t afford pure research. They are mostly customer driven. They invest where they see profit. The original research is in fact limited to universities. As of Indian universities are concerned, except few there is a total lack of synergy between academia and the software industries. Most of Indian researchers whom I have met work more on theoretical research; ask them about implementation they will shy away. They lack the enthusiasm on learning new things. For these oldies Fortran, Pascal, Latex is enough. They hardly think beyond that. They give some figures, statistics in their papers, and nobody dares to ask them how they really simulated it! Often those figures they use for bench marking with a previous research done on the same area.
Most of my friends thank to the guy who invented this copy-and-paste. So do I. Apple first introduced that in Lisa in 1981. Twenty-five years after we still hail if not Lisa but the immortal concept of copy-and-paste it introduced.
Long-live Ctrl-C. Long-live Ctrl-V.
~Swarup
