Brian's World

Another year

As I’ve been saying today: another year, another disappointment. Its mid-April, which means Google announced the participants for this summer’s summer of code. As per standard operating procedure, I was declined again. I tried to increase my odds this year by submitting more than 1 project, but one of them was quickly torn down as I lacked a mentor. That guilt can sit on you guys readers. The other one, I do not know what happened. During the extended discussion period, I recieved a total of 0 comments regarding the entire thing.

I found it rather frustrating to be declined with 0 comments, or just the fact I got 0 comments to start with. I understand there were tons of applications and everything, but my understanding was that the extended discussion period was to handle that. Apparently not, at least in my case. Whether my application had “fallen though the cracks” or was just too terrible not to be commented on, I do not know. While I got declined last year as well, I was at least given a comment or two on my application where the mentoring organization asked for clarifications and stuff; I felt as if I actually had a chance. This year non of that, just a blank comments section “ranking in progress”.

What I also find strange is the lists of people who get accepted into the program, a lot of them.. at least the outspoken ones, tend to be the same people from previous years. While I don’t have access to the data, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of them are return coders. It makes sense, they have proven they can work well in previous SOC projects, so they can likely do well again. Maybe they’re already friendly with the organization, I don’t know. This isn’t what I think about when I think of some of ideas behind SOC, I always imagined the idea was to bring new people into a project and teach them about it and everything. The idea reminds me of those “freelancer” sites where you can look for abd bid on projects, the people who get choosen tend to be the ones who have the most experience on the site, making the entrance bar very high. I certainly hope the folks at Google do everything in their power to make the entrance bar as low as possible.

I would also like to express frustration at repeat students. If I were selected to be a student, I would probably not apply for the program next year. I don’t think anyone should count on this as a steady summer job or something like that, and should give others a swing at it.

That said I’m sorry I’ve been ranting about GSOC again. I haven’t been pleased with the program for 3 years now, maybe next year will prove to be better… though I doubt it.

Setting the tone for summer, I will be disappointed I guess. Things won’t work out for me as I’d like. While I might not be converting financial reports, I am unsure how exciting the IT work will be. I guess I was hoping for an acceptance letter today to indicate to myself that I am stil decent at what I do. The past week has, and continues to, be filled with reminders, emails, etc that boil down to “you are stupid” or “you are dumb”. I am glad Google re-affirmed that fact this year. I did find this year’s rejection email surprisingly familiar, it was very much the same as last years. They told me it wasn’t me, it was my application… which is like saying the F in math is not you, its your tests. The application didn’t fill itself out now did it.

I have to get back to generating 100 tuples of nonsense. It won’t matter though, this will just be a failure like everything else.

I’ll be here all night.