“You will work on the newest technologies”

The title of this entry is actually taken from one ad searching for prospective students to work in a Croatian telecom after graduating. Actually, ad itself is very cleverly thought out and I have to give credit to the one who thought of it. But, there is always doubt that it was actually “taken” from someone else...

What's important about this sentence is how little it actually says and how misleading it is. To work on the newest technologies is very attractive, but, the secretaries working on Word 2007, or whatever latest version is, are also working on the newest technologies! So, in order to find out what this sentence really means, I'm going to dissect it a bit. But before I continue let me stress one thing. I'm talking about average case, and correspondingly, it might be true for the particular telecom, but it also might be false!

The hart of the problem is that the reality of Croatia is the fact that there is almost no development, and everything boils down to giving services and selling something. So, the phrase working on the newest technologies means actually configuring devices or application software products, and if you are particularly unlucky, to sell them! And what is so attractive of being user and/or seller instead of being engineer?! I suppose that students enrolled in electrical engineering and/or computer science courses because they don't treat themselves as users.

Now, you might say that by configuring this devices, or application software, one is actually using it as a tool and doing something new! But let's try again, when we are talking about telecom - and the others are more or less the same, the marketing department is the one who says that company needs another service/product/whatever. Engineering department then reads manuals of available equipment and their capabilities and configures it so that requested service is implemented! Now, where's development in that process?!

And one related thing, namely, there are a plenty of different ads seeking employees and offering work on newest technologies, while the truth is, when you start working, you are only allowed to look into this equipment (if there is any) and, because it is used in production environment, you are not allowed to play with it!

So, to conclude, working on the newest technology in Croatia isn't so exciting for an engineer as it might sound at first.