The company havn’t hire co-op for a long time during the down turn. The business has been slowly picking up, and the summer we have many co-ops like in good the old days. For those lives outside Canada, co-op is the term for intern in Canadian. Usually we hire university students for 4 months through this co-op job experience program.
My team got a co-op, who will be assigned to the tedious tasks that no one wants to touch. We think co-op are great slave labour, usually got fed all the boring jobs. I bumped into a friend working downstairs during a coffee break and asked him how do he like his new slave. I am surprise to find out his department didn’t get any co-op. Engineers with at least several years of experience has to do the grunt works. Not a very good use of resource. However, his department likes to outsource design works to India on the other hand. What is the logic behind oversource instead of hiring co-op. Co-op is as cheap as the Indian guys. From my experience, most of the co-ops are much better. You can work with the co-op face to face. If they have any problem, you can help them out easily. Most important, the co-op are eager to learn. On contrary, the Indian guys just want get by with minimium work and maximium pay.

Today I read a news article about Bill Gate’s comment on the future of software. He claim that in the future, all software will be sold as services instead of shrink wrap applications in a box. I am surprise this kind of nonsense come out from the person who once was a great coder. There is no difference between traditional software or software as a service. Software are just codes, method of delivery is irrelevant. No matter what form a software appears, it takes up some disk space and requires some CPU cycles to run. The questions where to store the code and where to run the code. The term software as a service really means storing and running the code on a remote server. Some application make sense to run remotely as such sales tools or CRM, which requires only a thin layer of code hook up with hugh backend database. The communication between the database and the user is the bottleneck. While most of traditional software doesn’t even make sense to run remotely. Try to image using photoshop or full-featured word over the internet. The speed, even with boardband, would be make it a pain to use. Today’s PC comes with cheap CPU power and harddisk space, while the boardband access is still relatively expensive. If Microsoft really decided to market all its software as services, I am sure the opensource folks will happy to fill in the gaps, as well as empty harddisk space and CPU cycles.