Churning out software engineers to boost the Sri Lankan IT industry
Sanjeev Niles 
Views & Interviews 
17 June 2009 
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Any software development industry runs on its core – the software engineer. The Sri Lankan software industry is no different and the industry is heavily dependent on the development and engineering resources available. (When I say software engineer, I exclude Quality Assurance Engineers, Business Analysts etc. )
One of the obstacles to growth of the IT industry in Sri Lanka prior to the global recession was the dearth of Software Engineers in the country. Software development houses often found that they could not recruit the volumes of qualified software engineers needed in order to secure more projects.
Even though the Sri Lankan IT industry is currently feeling the effects of global downturn, it will have to look ahead at better times to come. The issue of lack of abundant resources for development needs to be addressed so that Sri Lanka can be a hotspot for software development.
Key factors:
1. Quality of engineering education:
Most IT education institutes in Sri Lanka don’t focus on the quality of engineering education in their institute. Attention to detail when teaching programming languages is neglected and the focus is more on covering syllabuses within a given time frame. The end effect of this is that many students are turned off by the subject and focus greater attention to charter their career along the lines of System Administration, Quality Assurance, System Analysis and Project Management.
Teaching a programming language, its concepts and underlying technology is an art in itself. It is important that there is an initiative from the industry to ensure higher quality in engineering education. Ensuring that a wider percentage of students gain practical understanding and knowledge of the language is key to ensuring that more IT professionals take up software engineering as their career path.
2. Working conditions and environment:
Software Engineering is widely regarded as a high stress job in the industry. Even though engineers are generally paid handsomely, the levels of stress that come with the job are so high that it keeps away potential engineers from entering the field.
Once again the industry needs to come up with solutions to this problem and enable software engineering to be viewed as a less tedious career. There are many ways to approach this. Some of which are:
Ensuring more effective processes to reduce rework
Discouraging excessive working hours
Make it an industry practice to make a conscious initiative in the organisation to reduce stress levels of the job
3. Clarity on progress and career path in engineering:
Software engineers often move up the ladder to become solution architects and finally become the strategic directors of an organisations development policy. Young IT professionals in Sri Lanka often do not have a clear vision of where they envisage their engineering career would lead during the course of time. This keeps them from embarking on the tough first steps of beginning an engineering career. It is the responsibility of both IT educators and organisations to provide IT professionals with information regarding options available for them to further their career from the starting point of being software engineer to the levels to follow.
One of the most important factors is to build a strong bond between software development companies and IT education institutes and universities. Development companies should have a degree of control on syllabuses, course material and lecturer knowledge management. This would ensure that IT education in Sri Lanka is guided with industry trends ensuring that new quality engineering resources are constantly generated.
Extending education to previous conflict areas will also be crucial in enhancing the number of engineers produced. (Anushka Wijesinha has elaborated more on strengthening education in the north and east here.)
A strong engineering workforce will enable Sri Lanka to become a much stronger player in the IT industry, and efforts need to be made to achieve this. These efforts need to be initiated by the industry itself, thus the collaboration of the visionary minds of the industry is crucial.
Related posts:
- Open University launch a new Bachelor of Software Engineering (BSE) programme to expand the IT workforce capacity
- Virtusa’s TestFest 2010 – Making Software’s Defect-Free
- Corporate Sri Lanka can help our IT industry
- Business Software Alliance to create awareness: Focuses on perils of software piracy
- Sri Lankan Association of Software and Service Companies join the International Outsourcing Forum 2010 as lead sponsor
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You make some very good points…however the suggestions made appear to be long term, top down solutions…not sure we have the luxury of time? In addition to the private sector and IT education institutions taking the lead I’d like to share a couple of other ways that are gaining popularity in the tech industry in the US that may work well in Sri Lanka (since they are ultra low cost and fairly easy to replicate with some basic tools):
1) An “unconference” is basically a group of people who get together (they could be friends, freelancers, programmers, students) and set a date, time and place where people ‘show up’ and the topics are decided organically, on the spot. Often you may have from 100 – 300 people show up if it is promoted well over blogs, twitter, facebook etc. There is no fee to attend, no fancy program that is printed and very low overheads. The idea is whoever shows up is the right people, whatever time it starts is the right time and whenever it ends is the right time. Presenters do not receive compensation for sharing their skills. Everyone is a volunteer.
2) The other idea is informal “tribes” or “meetups” – where people gather informally once a month in a public place to share skills. There is no formal structure though the facilitator can set the agenda or the agenda is set based on what each person brings to the meeting (a programming problem, a user interface design issue, etc) Often volunteers who are great at wordpress will set up a wordpress meet up, those who want to learn ruby on rails will set up a rails meet up. While meetup.com does not work in Sri Lanka I see no reason why this could not be coordinated through Facebook? Perhaps it already is and I’m not aware of it…If not, all it takes is for one individual or a group of individuals to take the initiative to set this up.
17 June 2009 at 10:38 pm