Perils of Paid Projects

Oofff !! paid projects! They are really goddamn useless. I know, if you had got a paid project, you would have experienced it. Ok ok, if you are not aware of what im talking about, its about the final semester project for BE students, specifically CSE and IT people. Almost every friend of mine studying BE, paid to get their projects done. What they do is, they go a project center, pay Rs.3000 or more per head (if its a group project) and buy all the powerpoint presentations that we should be presenting for every review, all the source code and full documentation. Now, thats cool, atleast by the look of it.

Many people i know, who paid for such projects, got paid for paying them. First, they don't get any working knowledge of the technology on which the project is based on. Second, most of the paid projects just won't work. Third, my final review was today and people were configuring their projects on the college computers. The moment they copied all the files and executed the project, they got a "File Not Found" error. Wondering what had happened, they copied everything again and ran the project; still the same error !!!???!!!

Those idiots at the project center, wrote a small snippet of code that will erase all the files during execution if the date is on or after 2nd April 2006. Imagine all those people configuring the project and during the review, it crashes on the face of the external examiner. That is sad. Who should be blamed here? The students or the project centers??

My answer will be the students. As long as there are people who get cheated, there will be cheaters. They have got 3 full months to learn a technology and implement a decent enough project. Only when you implement a project, you will really learn a technology, its working and how you can make the current version of your project better. The external examiner today asked us to open source code of the project. He pointed at an arbitrary function and asked us to explain its working. Since we did the project on our own, we were able to answer. All those people who got paid projects are doomed for sure :( :((. They just cannot explain the source code of the project, let alone understand the technology behind it.

To all my juniors, Guys, NEVER go for paid projects. They will make your life miserable. Even if you had never learnt anything in all the 4 years, this 3 months is enough to learn and implement a decent enough project. The main purpose of projects in the last semester is to test your working knowledge. When the paid project you give is not going to give you the knowledge you want, then what is the use of paying Rs.3000 per head?? Think and look before you leap.

ALL THE BEST !

And sorry if i had hurt anyone's feelings. I hope this has opened the eyes of my juniors.