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Is Postgraduate Education of Benefit in Nigeria?

“Why would you offer me, a Banking Officer, the same grade that I was before I went to school, despite my Masters from the University of Liverpool?”

I looked at the dude like he just fell out of the sky and gate-crashed into a nudist camp. I swore under my breath; what the heck?

“Dude, that’s the best we can do for this role. Based on policy and work load, this function can only be for, at the highest, a Banking Officer”.

That exchange happened some years ago with some younger colleague who wanted to get back on my team. That same scene has played over a zillion times across a billion hiring offices nationwide.

He grudgingly took the job but he hated me (he was always giving me side eye) for it.

Before you label me the evil boss, probably jealous of the guy’s achievements, hear me out.

The quest for higher education is an insatiable itch for a lot of Nigerians and when our universities went tits-up, we started hustling for foreign degrees. I reckon it’s as itchy as being broody, if you get what I mean.

After 6 agonizing years studying Electrical Engineering, at which I thoroughly sucked, I left school and promised never go to back again. University for me was boring, horrible and we lived in terrible conditions. In those days there weren’t private universities so you either went abroad (only few did as the economy was, em, no comments) or go for top notch Federal Universities.
If you are going to eat toads, go for the ones with eggs.

But just after a few months, I started dreaming of Masters and PhD. I tried to do some bits at UNILAG, but they were arrogant and uncoordinated. Considering I like to be the only arrogant person in the room, I couldn’t stick that. In fact to add insult to injury, I was asked to do 1 year of postgraduate diploma before I could enroll for a Masters in Information Technology. Àrífín!

Lumbering along in my career, I saw so many people, with crushed expectations and broken hearts, who had spent many years earning high quality Masters at top notch schools, being asked to take the same levels or sometimes something less than they earned before they went for higher education. I asked myself – is it worth it?

In the defense of the employers, the lack of regards doesn’t come from inferiority complex (as some have been accused) or lack of understanding (that’s also an accusation) but from asking a simple question – how does your Masters/PhD give you an advantage in delivering superior results in the specific roles than the gorímápás that didn’t bother leaving their desks? Employers pay for output not for robes and mortal boards.

This annoyance was most prevalent in banking but also happened in Telecoms, FMCG, general Commerce, etc.

My itch for higher education didn’t disappear but I advised myself with wisdom – go when you are newly promoted and senior enough to manage the slowdown.

I finally summoned courage to do my Masters at a ripe old age (I was the oldest in my class) but foolishly chose a tough brain-cell killing Masters in Engineering. It almost turned to the worst mistake of my life but after boasting to my colleagues that I wasn’t going to come back to Nigeria if I didn’t knock out a distinction, I read so hard my eyes fell out.

But then I still paid dearly for it. I ended up spending almost 5 years on a single grade. Do I have regrets about the Masters? Absolutely NOT! Do I have regrets about hanging around like an aborigine on a single grade? Absolutely YES! Could I have done it a bit better? YES!

By the way, not all schools are born equal. I know alumni of Ivy League Colleges and other expensive schools fare better. But then truth be told, many of them already have the advantage, connections, money, bla bla, to land the good careers in the first place and the schools are just an extension of the exclusive clubs they belong to.

If you like, you can count this as the rant of a sore loser.
After all is said and done, I have come to the following conclusions:

There is nothing better than education.
Higher education may not do much for your career unless it’s very highly specialized. For example, if you are going to work in fancy UN style organizations, a PhD is a must.
MBAs are too generic. If you must get one, go to a top-notch school. Start saving now.
Go to school when your career has become stable and you have established credibility.
Nobody trusts your MBA when you have never worked before. It’s like calling yourself a military General just after NDA – either you are a joker or a clown.
Nothing substitutes for a good school. It’s foolish looking for a cheap school just for the sake of higher education.
Long distance learning is WAY HARDER than being in class! If you see anyone go through it, respect them.

I guess my opinions may be wrong or maybe my experiences are different from yours. If you have had similar or diverse experiences on this, kindly share below.

Base64 in Microsoft SQL

Base64 encoding is a Swiss Army knife function for every programmer but somehow not readily available in Microsoft SQL Server. Or that’s what everyone thinks.

Apparently it has been hiding in MS SQL since 2005 release. So recently while searching for a working solution, I found a something workable at this blog post and then used that to create two SQL user defined functions.

Use freely but attribute.
CREATE function [dbo].[base64encode] (@input varchar(max) ) returns varchar(max) begin declare @source varbinary(max) set @source = convert(varbinary(max), @input) return cast('' as xml).value('xs:base64Binary(sql:variable("@source"))', 'varchar(max)') end GO
CREATE function [dbo].[base64decode] (@input varchar(max) )
returns varchar(max) begin return cast('' as xml).value('xs:base64Binary(sql:variable("@input"))', 'varbinary(max)') end GO

If you value me, you will know my name

A simple email addressed ‘Dear Valued Customer’ can ruin a day. Names matter; they’re personal. With technology, there’s no excuse for impersonal communication. It’s a sign of disregard and laziness.

I had a pretty hard day recently and topping the cherry of my nasty ice-cream was a mail from a bank and it went “Dear Valued Customer”.

I smashed something.

Backtrack to some 3 decades ago. I remember how we picked chicken fights when someone made a mess of our name, especially surname. There is something so important to names that everyone has at least one; sometimes a name is only what some people have got.

If you really value me as your customer then I should be a person. It’s bad enough to be a statistic. It’s worse that you don’t even have the decency to call me by name.

With cheap and accessible technology nobody, I mean no company worthy of its salt, can say it doesn’t have access to tools to personalize services talk less of emails. So it means one thing – either the company is clueless or doesn’t give two horse legs about me.

It’s like choosing between getting shot in the forehead or on the temple. Both are bad propositions.

Why should I care about you if you don’t care about me?

I don’t know if my conclusion is grounded in science or hogwash but I strongly believe that companies that personalize greetings, emails, SMS, and other interactions would also be good in customer service. It shouldn’t be a rocket science to feel that someone who goes through that pain to make me feel special would care enough to provide a good service.

Personalizing services isn’t trivial but getting your customers back after losing them would be much more difficult.

Some customers don’t have taste.

I see it every day – people, practically everyone on two legs, take rubbish work they pay dearly for. Bad painting, poor haircut, badly sewn dresses, etc. So when they get “Dear Valued Customer” they feel no pain.

This is going to be a tough battle!

TL;DR

My annual vacation is rapidly winding down so with hours left to spare, I tried to catch on some reading; I love to read because I can imagine things not possible, go back over sentences, laugh, scream, and scowl; nobody’s gonna judge me.

Some good long forms that I found interesting:

Bob Henderson lost $200M and got it all back. Never say it’s over until it’s really over

Rosie and Samantha are like Gordon Gekko of the strippers’ world. I’m happy I never met them

The world has gone really mad about Digital, McKinsey weighed in on the issue
2016 may be disruptive for electronic payments

By the way, TL;DR means Too Long; Don’t Read.

Mum, AI took my job

AI’s expanding capabilities, from personal assistants to image recognition, pose questions about job security. Then there’s the scary part, the prospect of AI inventing other AIs. Will this lead to more widespread job displacements?

Recently jobless, I took to trolling the internet for good inspiring stories and I fortunate to bump into a long form on George Hotz inventing a self-driving car. George is of internet fame when he was the first to successfully hack an iPhone and then made a mess of Sony. That’s then.

There are many ways to skin a cat, at least if you can kill the cat first. But then automating self-propulsion isn’t a piece of cake. Planes have been flying themselves for over 84 years but all because danfo drivers don’t fly. Come to terra firma, somewhere around Abule Egba, and it’s a different ball game.

The best known name in the game is Google and they have been plugging away at this for years. Meanwhile African bad boy, Elon Musk recently released a patch that allows a Tesla to drive itself on the highway.

Summary, it costs zillions of dollars and millions of years to do build a working self-respecting self-driving car. Really?

George has turned all this on its head. In October of this year, he invested $50,000 ($30K of this was for a brand new Acura ILX 2016) and presto out came out a decent self-driving automobile. In 2 months? You must be kidding me.
This is where it starts to get interesting.

George’s approach is totally different from others. Instead of programming every conceivable rule and regulation of how to drive and what to expect (let Google come to Obalende!) he taught the car driving like the way I could teach my niece. Many things have made this possible – advent of deep learning, cheap computers, sensors, etc.

The bit I love is his bet against Musk.

So what has AI got to do with losing your job? Well, truth is AI can be taught to do many things. They already power simple things around you – SIRI, Cortana, Google search, image recognition, etc. What happens when it can be a perfect secretary, equity trader, physician, customer service officer, proofreader – correcting my numerous typos?

There is a lot it can do or may not do. The scariest for me though, would be when AIs can invent other AIs. Then, I’m sure that damnation would be an understatement.