Development Career revisited

Yesterday I was discussing with a friend the development career options in egypt and here are my thoughts that I told him about and want to share it with you too..
i said :
a friend once told me the following
germany, usa and japan are the places where development is based on theory and makes successful return on global market and industry
below those comes outsources that lack a part of the success triangle which is either management, science or resources
working in them is good but is not gaining the right experience
the titles they give are not the real ones that totally express what is done
the roles and tasks are mostly overlaping and gets the person out of his scope thus he can hardly be specialized in what he wants
these countries include egypt, india, emirates, china, canada and many others
it is up to u, if u want to do the real thing, learn right, work right,..etc then u can set ur goal working in one of top 3, and vision to become a true developer and then plans can include any companies and projects that will eventually end up with u in these countries
many people put finance or family or prosperity as the their goal and their vision to have a lot of that :D the problem is that their plans will be towards moving sands
any second they stop working they will fall and might never be able to stand again ..

Left the Giant

Yesterday marked my last day at vodafone VFE.
I had very nice three months working there, I gained a lot of knowledge about the telecommunications world, the production and application support as well as the meaning of systems analyst title and what is OnCall all about.
Vodafone Egypt is a very nice place, its facilities and buildings are very well designed and organized.
Multinational companies and corporates, it is all about the hierarchy, reporting tree, escalation matrix, service level agreements, policies, off-site meetings, outings and tight workflow of change management.
I was never before this point in time; a client, they gave me this very new perspective of being 'the client' and having 'vendors', how to deal with that, get what you want from vendor and serve your own 'clients' who ranged from the normal person (subscriber) to dealers, agents and even internal employees.
I also never worked that close with sun microsystem servers, i had the opportunity to bounce against the command line of unix.
The job was systems analyst, which is all about supporting running applications, constantly monitoring and solving any raised trouble tickets and escalating them to vendors if resolution is not clearly defined in documents...
VFE is a big company with lots of departments, many lines of support, a special atmosphere and environment that you could hardly forget.
And yes the OnCall part, this was new to me as well, in OnCall you have to be in a standby mode for 24 hours during the days you were scheduled to be OnCall.
You then might receive phone calls or sms indicating the state of certain systems upon which you have to act, acting might require going to the headquarters data center or you could just solve it from your laptop using your connect card based upon the severity of problem.
It was a great experience, but gradually I felt I am losing the only thing I could do well, that is, development and planning.
In applications support you are taken away from development, planning, and anything related to the roles and tasks you used to have when you worked as a software engineer/developer.
When I handed over my resignation, I truly believed that this job is so early for me, although it is not hard and could be done but once you are totally in you will never know or be good at anything else, which decreases and eliminates my options and chances to work anywhere else later on.
It is sad that I had to leave such a nice company but anyways..I wish all its people the best of luck.

VoicesOfEgypt featured in BusinessToday magazine

Surprisingly I just knew that in the latest issue of Business Today magazine, December 2005 one, our blog was featured and mentioned in their article about blogging in Egypt.

Check it out:

http://www.businesstodayegypt.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=6202

Look for the part that says:

"At VoicesofEgypt.com, 20 contributors maintain a central page dedicated to issues of technology, politics and other topics (such as the ongoing search for extraterrestrial life)."

and

"Blogging is very new for Egyptians," says Hani Gamal, a senior developer at the IT firm BMB Group and a contributor to VoicesofEgypt.com, "and [people] are proving they can use the technology very well."

For all visitors and non-contributors, we are open to accept any new contributors that wish to be part of our community, all you need is to drop me an email asking for membership and mentioning the reason and you will get it.

Happy Blogging and Go VoicesofEgypt ...go.. go :)

21 grams

One's life is just a long day that lies between stimulus and response with a weight not more than 21 grams -in the plain materialistic sense. Although, all humans look alike when seen from a far distance, not a thumb is like the other. While everyone is constantly fighting to keep their lives going, only few keep it meaningful. A meaning remains but a detail wears out.