An engineer's incentive

From Webster's New Dictionary :

incentive a. : arousing. -n. something that arouses to feeling or action.

It didn't quite start out as a normal day. I was somehow not in the very best of moods, today was one of those days where you feel right from the start that something will go wrong.

And I didn't make the proper choices either. I chose to wear a shirt that I had sworn a year ago to never wear again, thinking that it was time I got over those issues.

Today, we had our 'Web Technologies' vivas, for which I was decently prepared. I had not studied ASP, since I've never needed to use it, although I am pretty familiar with Java servlets and PHP. It started off well, I answered the first questions with relative ease, given that they were simple HTML/Javascript questions. Then the external asked whether we knew JSP. None of my partners knew, neither did I. Then she looked at me and casually asked - "Why?". And I answered - "I had no incentive."

Well, that seemed to tick her off. No no, it did tick her off. She talked about how she has to teach ASP, HTML, and JavaScript every year, does she ask for incentives? Do I get more money just because I teach ASP, she asked. I replied - "maim, money is not the only incentive one can get." Wrong move.

She countered by giving an example of a boy in her class, who, inspite of being well versed with JSP, did his project in ASP, because she had asked it to be done. According to me, that was compulsion. She forced him to do it. We were given the freedom to use any language for our project - of course, it still had to be an "e-commerce website." I chose PHP. Our ma'am had no problem with it, I am grateful to her for that.

Later on, she asked me questions that were very platform-specific, like where does IE store it's cookies, how do u set up an HTTP server (IIS) on a port other than 80, how do u disable cookies in IE etc. I told her that I have not used Windows for over a year now, and had no idea about how IIS goes about doing it's job, or where XP stores it's cookies. She found this unacceptable, she told me that I use Windows in college, I should know all this. Well, I do use Windows in college, but very rarely do I get the chance to surf the net. Even if I do, I am not the admin to be worrying about cookies.

Later, while putting my file in the heap alongside others, I heard the external tell our ma'am that people who need "incentives" to learn something, have no place in engineering. I am sorry ma'am, but I feel we two have very different views on engineering.