Slashdot Mirror
With Troop Drawdown, IT Looks To Hire More Vets
Lucas123 writes "The military's a great place to learn how to kill people and break things, but many also consider it one of the best training grounds for high-tech skills. 'If you're working on a ship or a plane or tank, you've got responsibility for large, complex, extremely expensive equipment run by highly sophisticated IT platforms and software,' said Mike Brown, senior director of talent acquisition at Siemens. But, just how well do military tech skills translate to private-sector IT? Computerworld spoke to veterans to find out just what they learned during their tours of duty and how hard it was to transition to the civilian workforce."
This is much more of propaganda, and far less of reality. The reality is much more of people who have shallow and overly specific skills, whose ability to learn and innovate on their own has been stunted, who are much more willing to just do anything and claim it was an order rather than being an active, thinking participant in the process. If you need people who will just take on tasks from some ticketing system, do whats in it, close it, take the next one and keep doing that for 8 hours every day of the week - sure, hiring ex-military will probably pay off.
Ex-military is not the contingent from where you will find people passionate about IT or CS. And those are the people you want if you are not just doing routine crap. And as a result, ex-military is extremely poor fare to recruit.