Seeing how I’m constantly looking for ways to promote .Net and software development in general, I’ve been thinking about ways in which the .Net community can be galvanized into action – i.e., how can people be motivated to write articles, post blog entries, meet in professional conferences, host worshops, et cetera? Putting this in the context of the city I live, it would appear that what I’m trying to achieve is impossible.

It seems somewhat foolish to try and project Western ideals onto a Russian culture. It doesn’t seem to work.

Well, it works to some extent. But not in the way one would like – there’s a fundamental lack of engineering culture, however we try to tell ourselves the opposite, and whatever we do is essentially a bit like trying to promote Communism – a goal that seems hopeless given the public’s general disinteterest. And while we won’t give up (after all, plenty of people are interested in programming to the extent they will visit our meetings), it does affect the strategy that can be chosen given the current social as well as economic climate.

I see two things happening. First, the group will contrinue to grow at a very small rate (I doubt we’ll ever have >50 people unless we cheat), so what we need to do is focus on the quality of the meetings rather than, say, on getting ourselves funding or even a better room.

The second thing I see coming is a shift of focus towards creating an environment where engineering culture can be nurtured in such a way that it doesn’t get significantly moderated by the fact that we live in Russia and not elsewhere. This is tough – there are some companies (e.g., this one) that manage to create great developer atmosphere and whatnot, but I’m after something more inclusive where the place you work doesn’t matter. It should be cool enough to just be a .Net developer.

Unfortunately, engineering culture can only be created in the context of a company, not a community. In other words, what makes great engineers great appears to be, at least given the situation, to be large amounts of money. We need to be able to afford changes financially before we try proposing them. Of course, this implies levying the burden from the decrepit and corrupt education systems that teaches people using last-century textbooks and whatnot. And that makes the whole proposition even harder.

To sum up, we won’t change the world: we’ll make it fun for ourselves and a few people but without business incentives, promotion of engineering culture is doomed to fail with all but the most fanatical of people. And I guess this is okay. After all, our jobs might one day end up at India or China, in which case we’ll pat ourselves on the back and say thanks that we didn’t invest into IT more than we should have.