Computing Professionals Bill : Another case of listening to the clueless by Erna Mahyuni

DEC 14 — The Computing Professionals Bill 2011 was drafted by clueless people. That is the only conclusion I can make after reading MOSTI’s press statement in response to the backlash from the local tech community, and what the Bill’s “champions” have to say.

Let me share this quote from a report on The Malaysian Insider yesterday: “This is the fastest vehicle for us to get there (to international standards). If not, what would be another vehicle to bring us forward?” a National Professors Council member (Datuk Halimah Badioze Zaman) said at the open day.

Also in the article, Under Secretary Amirudin Abdul Wahab said the Bill was created to “reverse Malaysia’s sliding standards in computing as reflected by its drop from 50th place to 56th place in the International Telecommunication Union ICT Development Index between 2002 and 2008.”
Exhibit One and Exhibit Two of missing the point entirely.

Suggesting that a Bill will magically improve computing standards in Malaysia is delusional at best and destructive at worst. These “standards” set by the Bill will be set not by an international body, but by a special board whose members are appointed by the MOSTI minister. The Bill, of course, assumes that the MOSTI minister is not a complete cretin, which, sadly, would be hard to prove considering the general standard of intelligence displayed by our ministers in Parliament.

The closest counterpart in wording and spirit to the proposed Bill is not from technology-rich countries like the United States or Finland. No, we are aping a Bill from Nigeria. Country of email spammers and corrupt politicians, hooray.

But then we are a country that thinks we can spur innovation by, get this, creating an agency. Yes, we have the Malaysian Innovation Agency that has such lofty objectives as:

“To bring about holistic societal well-being through the cultivation of the innovation eco-system, and to drive the national innovation agenda to generate new-wave wealth.”

Is that even English? Did someone record a minister talking in his sleep and put the recording through Google Translate?

This is what happens when smart people are too busy doing things like creating start-ups, that they end up letting stupid people run the show.

It is fundamentally short-sighted to think about a “fastest way” to become internationally credible. These things take time and hard work and input from people who can actually think and not merely spout enough babble for us to believe they can.

Requiring IT professionals to take courses and wave certificates proving their competence displays an ignorance of how the industry works. I can’t teach myself to perform open heart surgery but I can learn the basics of programming Python in a matter of weeks.

I know people who can code in Python in a matter of days. IT certifications are expensive pieces of paper that need to be upgraded often as the industry moves fast, with knowledge becoming obsolete in a very short amount of time.

When it comes to government tenders, it’s not the lack of regulation that leads to shoddily-built government applications. It’s poorly-written contracts and a poor understanding of tender requirements that are to blame. Look at the last Budget and note how there were no incentives at all for the local tech sector. The industry needs more liberalisation, not less.

What the IT industry needs is not more regulation but for people who truly understand the industry to devise better measures than creating another level of bureaucracy. IT education in this country needs to be improved. Public universities, for instance, put too much emphasis on theory instead of practice, knowing full well their syllabuses are poorly tailored towards what the industry actually needs.

Halimah complained that A-students weren’t enrolling for IT degrees. The simple fact is we don’t need more IT academicians; we need more IT practitioners. I think local public universities aren’t willing to face the fact that, unlike law or engineering, non-degree holders can succeed in the tech sector. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg. College dropouts, biggest names in tech, and people who technically would be disqualified by the CPB.

Why not encourage kids to learn to code? Have competitions for building websites or simple games and have tech vendors sponsor them. Encourage computer clubs, let kids know from an early age that a career in computing is a viable and interesting option.

What is happening now is that MOSTI is not listening to people who want better computing standards. It is listening to people who have vested interests in controlling the lucrative cash cow that is government IT projects.

The tech community has spoken up against the Bill. Will MOSTI listen to them or bow to the desires of a select few to create an IT cartel and the desperate attempts of public university IT faculties to mask their irrelevance?

But here’s something Malaysians can be proud of, in regards to the tech industry. While in Norway, only 10-20 per cent of computer science students are women, we can say that women comprise 50 per cent here. We also boast the highest number of female attendees at the annual Microsoft Tech.Ed conference in Malaysia, in comparison with other Southeast Asian countries.

We don’t have a “bad” industry, we just need all the help we can get and the Bill is certainly no help at all.