Slashdot Mirror
Geeks On a Plane Proposed To Solve Global Tech Skills Crisis
judgecorp writes "British Airways' Ungrounded project proposes to shut 100 Silicon Valley 'gamechangers' in a trans-Atlantic plane and ask them to solve the world's tech skills crisis during a 12-hour flight to London. On arrival, the passengers will head into a conference where they will present their ideas to, among others, the UN. From the article: 'Ungrounded, as the project is called, will bring 100 “innovators” (Silicon Valley CEOs, thinkers and venture capitalists) on a private BA flight from San Francisco to London. During the flight, they will take part in a “global hack” run by Ideo, a design firm which has made mice for Microsoft and Apple.'"
Put at least Stallman, ESR and Torvalds on that plane.
All fun and games until the guy in front decides to fully recline and you no longer have space to open your laptop. Aside from the usual 'hackathon' merits and drawbacks (personally, I'm not a fan of working flat out over my weekends); why on earth would you want to do this on a plane, in a noisy, cramped environment where you get to breathe in the same recycled air for 9 hours of pure mystery... I mean "fun".
They'll be great at brainstorming innovative ways of suckering gullible investors out of money, not sure what else "Silicon Valley CEOs, thinkers and venture capitalists" can do though.
Might be too many people that want to bring that plane down ....
Sung to the tune of bye bye miss american pie ... "I can remember the day the internet died"
I can solve this on ten seconds. Stop asking for every stupid little skill on the job ad and people would match. A good programmer is a good programmer.
End of rant :)
On a long enough timeline. The survival rate for everyone drops to zero. Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, 1996
Put the world's leading scientists in a locked room for a year and tell them to solve one of the world's most pressing problem. Mention that if they can't do it in a year, they get executed.
If they fail, it'll give more motivation for the next group.
Make sure to stock enough puke bags onboard.
Maybe they could collaborate and come up with a way to collaborate without having to get on a fucking airplane.
Oh wait you mean the entire article is a giant sales pitch about trying to get more people to fly more often instead of using a conference call?
Maybe they could have a co sponsor like Yahoo. Maybe they could talk about how they have to change their poorly managed business, make people accountable for their job tasks, and above all else... buy a kids program for an obscene amount of money. End of rant.
P !!
U !!
Cabin air bleeds you !!
What do venture capitalists and CEOs know about innovation?
Two things wrong with that idea: Firstly, it would put people that actually matter there, making it a high risk operation. Secondly, they don't want people who care about contributing to society interfering. By the way, what bloody crisis? There are plenty of people with skills, just recognize them and people will aspire to acquire skills too (because what we need is access and personal motivation). It still annoys me that Gates got the wrong honorary doctorate (technology, should have been business).
Those are some great people. Good thing they built this think tank and thank God we have such great people to rely on!
http://opencm3.net, http://www.nongnu.org/gm2/
The only global crisis I am aware of is the desire for western companies to drive down tech engineering and programmers wages.
What else could they be trying to solve on a freakin' plane?
-- Mean People Suck
Increase wages
Improve working conditions (starting with hours)
Stop flooding the market with cheap imported labor (it creates uncertainty in the labor pool)
Start training your hires and stop playing resume keyword bingo with applicants
Start investing in your people and stop looking to jump on the next "superstar"
Seriously... you get 150 applicants, and not a single one is qualified? That's a problem with your job, not with the labor pool.
And who in their right mind would go into this field knowing that firms would prefer to hire an H1B over you.
Of course they'll want unlimited H-1Bs since that's what the Harvard Business school taught them to say.
What is it they think SV CEOs and VCs really know how to do well actually?
It isn't solve the world's problems, it's monetize them.
It's more along the lines of turning what used to be a one-time $35 dollar product you purchase into a $8/month for-the-rest-of-your-life monthly service fee.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
The rest will follow, right?
(Captcha: wartime)
100 "innovators" (Silicon Valley CEOs, thinkers and venture capitalists)
How glad I am they put innovators in quotes.
They should have done the same to geeks in the heading.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Wer's glaubt, wird selig.
implement a global technocracy
that is all we need
Does it go on forever?
They'll just spend the better part of those 12 hours to get WiFi on board.
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
seriously, WTF?! Is our goverment structure so fucked up that a plane full of random people can solve their problems in 6 hours without access to additional data over what they already know?
That is one slow flight. SFO to LHR usually takes no more than 9.5 hours.
Also, has no one taken the 8 hour jet lag these people will be suffering into account?
You can start by reversing the trend of dumbing down user interfaces (GNOME 3, Windows 8 I'm looking at you), and make GUI's where the person using them has to actually understand what is going on with their computer.
Flight redirected... to india!
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
just think think what a single ground to air missile could accomplish - almost as good a start as 100 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
There's a reason some companies don't allow all their key staff to travel on one flight.
If (hopefully not) something happens to that plane, you've lost 100 game changers. I'm sure that'd benefit everyone.
Last time I checked, a lot of companies had policies against this kind of thing (hopefully it extends to this kind of stupidity as well)
Unhinged, more like.
But then any publicity is good publicity, right?
Just remember how much money Gates spent on a self declared failed education project....
They might be damn good at making money, but they are not as good or dont even care wellbeing for the majority... After all they are represent the best of what is making the world be as it is, socially speaking.
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
I have had it with these motherfucking geeks on this motherfucking plane!
As long as they also put plenty of venomous snakes on the plane. They'll need more than one flight to cut out all of the deadwood at the top, but it's got potential.
CEOs and VCs are not necessarily the people who have ideas, and if they do, they *already* have the means to express them. I'd rather see 100 respected, talented, peer-voted if necessary, folks on the panel: *true* technocrats, true innovators, not financial folks; people with ideas, sometimes wacky ideas, rather than folks money; the people who turn down a promotion to management because it would take them away from the detailed problem-solving.
Geeks on a plane. Great! Get back on the plane and fly to Haiti and figure out how to help those people. The $20B we sent them seems to not have arrived.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Bull$"/?
There's no skills crisis, there's a corporate unwillingness to pay for skill crisis.You want me, who has spent nearly three decades learning continuously, struggling to understand the latest IT technologies, some so bleeding edge that I helped form the damned standards, to work for the same amount of money I earned 30 years ago, while you, with your Business Administration undergraduate degree from Florida State take home nearly a million a year because you talk a maelstrom of bullshit every time you open your mouth.
F % ( # Y O U
...another tech bubble
Yes, get as many people as possible crammed into as many aircraft as possible. It's the only way...
This is just airline marketing. Why give it any prominence at all ?
It's just a bunch of rich bastards going on a junket dreaming up more ways to exploit cheap labor... and fucking the stewardesses
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
To fix the shortage, you can start by paying people what they are worth. IT work requires education (either college, on the job, and/or continuing education classes) This is not cheap, it is not easy to keep up with, and employers should pony up the funds to keep talent that can handle it, and help with paying for it (with both money and time off for classes.) If you look at the market, the places willing to pay for the top talent will get it.
Stop burn out... No one should ever be forced to work 50+ hour weeks on a regular basis. It may occasionally happen due to deadlines or support issues, but if it is a regular occurrence, there is a problem and it needs to be fixed. Many people leave the IT field due to stress, and this is a big reason.
End age discrimination... While fixing the above items can help this, and it does not happen everywhere, this is out there. A person doesn't go instantly dumb at 40... While there are exceptions, most IT people are willing to learn, if you are moving everything to the cloud and your entire department only knows COBOL, whose fault is that? A little training can go a long way. Re-training your IT department for your needs is a smart investment, if you are loyal to your employees, most will actually become loyal to you...
While I'm sure MBA's will disagree, if you change these policies, you will no longer have an IT shortage.
And here is one more, this one is more the fault of education instead of corporations... (also, mostly about developers, but it might apply to other fields)
We need to teach people how to program, not programming languages. There are too many people that learn a language without learning any programming concepts. They end up googling even simple programming solutions and slap crap together that needs to be rewritten with every minor spec change. The people that learned how to program will write something that is flexible and can be modified as the system evolves. Over time this will allow for time savings which will translate into needing fewer developers.
Looking for a job?
Want your resume written professionally?
DON'T USE TUNAREZ!!!
"Flakes on a Plane"
it would put people that actually matter there, making it a high risk operation
only in the case of torvalds... the other two are just hacktivists
they don't want people who care about contributing to society interfering
actually torvalds would fit quite well... he cares about engineering, not people
I know single-video comment is bad form, but I cannot think of anything more fitting than this.
"You have 10 years experience with Linux Visual Studio Distributed Synchronous Multithreaded Transactional Space Cloud Computing 2013. You will be responsible for mission critical projects and budgets 2M+. You are expected to be on call. We offer competitive compensation of up to $4/h."
Plane anymore. That is the solution.
In order to encourage innovation let's put the U.S. Congress on a similar flight.
With 11 hours of fuel.
I've had it with these motherfucking geeks on this motherfucking plane!
huh?
if you get all the SV CEOs and VCs onto one plane most of the tech world's problems could be eliminated with one well aimed SAM.
> British Airways' Ungrounded project proposes to shut 100 Silicon Valley 'gamechangers' in a trans-Atlantic plane
There is no way this can happen. One plane? A single thunder strike, pilot error or an angry guy with a shoulder fired chimney tube tbe could literally decapitate Silicon Valley. You see, corporations anf govts are not stupid, they have very strict rules on who may travel with whom in a single vehicle of any kind, in order to prevent loss of leadership scenarios.
crisis solved as people who know what the job entails are moved into management positions.
I think it is quite limited what you can get all three of them to agree on. But once they do agree on something, chances are it will be a really good idea.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Good that you mention aspiration. Today, our brightest kids are thinking about the career to pursue, and are faced with the following choice: coast through law school and get a job that pays well and is well-respected (I meant by regular folks, not us). Grab a masters in business school and be a high earning manager or hot shot consultant. Or slog your way through a masters in tech, which is generally far more difficult and often takes longer as well, after which you'll have a job that earns you little respect and pay to match (that's not a coincidence, by the way). The find out that companies mostly offer only sucky career progression, often having no way up except going into middle management, where you end up at a level which your buddy who went to business school got right out of the gate, more or less. What the hell kind of choice is that?
Back when I was deciding which uni to go to (in the late 80s), people already said you'd have to be mad to pick a career in tech, and since then things haven't improved any. I went anyway, as I prefer to do the things I love doing.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
it would put people that actually matter there, making it a high risk operation
only in the case of torvalds... the other two are just hacktivists
Classifying RMS as "just a hacktivist" only highlights your ignorance. I suggest you read up on everything he's achieved (he started emacs, gdb and gcc to name a few) as a hacker before making such an unfounded claim.
The fact that RMS also cares about people and not just about sating his own technological cravings is a positive point imho, whether I agree with him or not (and I often don't)
"100 Silicon Valley 'game changers' in a trans-Atlantic plane and ask them to solve the world's tech skills crisis during a 12-hour flight to London."
I'm sure they'll all agree that taxes should be lowered.
Uh. No. I'm kind of hoping that plane crashes.
Thing is, what made silicon valley what it was is a bunch of people trying all new things without the encumberance of a colon-full of patents and lawyers to spread them around. (See what I did there? It was intentional... let the image sink in.)
Want the "good old days" back? Remove the kings of the hill and let's see a new scramble to the top. It wasn't WHO got us there as much as that there was a place to go. In the race to the top, there was less effort in trying to keep everyone else down and more into trying to rise to the top.
Put the best of your thinkers on a single plane and shout about it in all the media in advance. No way the plane could be targeted.
scratch stallman. That man can't get along with anybody
...the letters "B-Ark" should be distinctly visible.
I turned down their invitation when I found out it wasn't on a flight to Las Vegas.
That many devs on one aircraft... makes on a plane.
Good idea, bad choice of people.
The real innovators and creative people are rarely the ones you see in the news or on the boards. More often then not, they are unknown.
It does take a visionary CEO or such to lead these people and to make their ideas into products, I do not want to diminish the skills of those people. Steve Jobs was one of them. But Steve Jobs did not invent the iPhone - he lead a company that did. The inspired the creative people within Apple that did. The created the environment in which they could.
Finding the really brilliant minds is no small task.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Bad idea to put 100 "gamechangers" in the same spot at the same time, especially on a plane.
+1 Insightful
I'd love it if someone would pull a hack (in the MIT-prevalent sense) and make that plane actually say "B" Ark, at least on touchdown in London.
When were these 'good old days'? There's a story from shortly after the founding of Sun. They got a visit from IBM with a set of patents that they claimed Sun infringed. They sat the patent lawyers down and explained why for each patent it was either invalid or didn't apply. The Nazgul replied that they were probably right, but they could come back with another seven patents that Sun did infringe, and fighting them in court would be far more expensive than Sun could afford. Sun signed a cross-licensing agreement with IBM. This was the early '80s.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
CEOs, venture capitlsts. To work in Silicon Valley they must be able to talk the talk, but I'll bet none of them is a "geek" as the word is used now. Though some might be adept at biting the heads off chickens.
Probably a good thing considering how clueless real geeks can be about how society works. They tend to be either libertarians, communists or anarchists. All equally unreal and unworkable philosophies in the real world.
Anyway, obviously the CEOs and venture capitalists will advocate importing cheap talent from poor countries to replace the expensive local workers. The only interesting thing is how they will present it to try to make it seem like a good thing for the first world workers. "You'll all be promoted to managers" maybe.
Really, they will present their idea to the UN? I'm sure that will help.
>Just remember how much money Gates spent on a self declared failed education project....
Which is that? "Self declared failed education project" is not a particularly fruitful search term
Coast through Law School? The only people I've heard of coasting through Law School never made it all the way through or stopped coasting after the first quarter. You know how some movies show law students running on treadmills with their books in front of them so they can study at the same time? That actually happens in real life all the time.
Would that be the second plane, which by total coincidence is also the first scheduled to leave?
That group of bovine standing over there appears quite portentous. That's right it's an ominous cow herd.
All global problems are political problems. The technical problems can be solved in short time (about 10 years). Real problems, like a non sustainable way to produce goods, are on a technical basis easy to solve. It may take time to implement, but they are not hard to solve. For most problems solution concepts already exist. However, it will not happen until politicians are able to establish an political process to do start the transformation. The skill crisis is also only a political problem. If politics would invest more money in education, reduce visa barriers, and support child education in a way that the sciences are presented in a positive way so that children like to look into these fields.
On the other side. Every software company I have seen, is not able to produce software in an efficient way. The all tinker with code instead of using solid processes. Single projects which used proper management methods all finished in time and stayed in a maintainable form.
They'll land with $15m VC funding, specs on which beanbags they want and a tech spec that reads "node.js + cloud".
Although of course no one would actually wish such a thing, would it not be utterly ironic, having taken to the air in their uber-high-tech flying machine, to have a little something go wrong with all the complex electronics, hydraulics, mechanics, never mind the human factors, or - dare one say - the batteries, and our winged think tank experiences a bit of a kink?
We will, too late, find out that there is only so much of the scientific genie our brilliant technology can manage.
Potato farming is looking like a far better option.
... and snakes
Oh, wait, it would be too cruel (to the snakes)
You start off by saying that CEOs and VCs know "a hell of a lot" about innovation, but your description is about them being good at business, not at innovation.
The reality is usually the opposite of what you say. CEOs and VCs do not generally have any significant ability at innovating technically at all, except by rare coincidence. But if a technical expert shows them something new then they may see a new business opportunity and will sometimes turn it into a successful business.
These are two different domains of interest. In general, a deeply insightful techie will have no interest in business because it's boring, and a deeply insightful businessman will have no interest in technical details because they're boring and require many years of hard study and experience to do well.
While there may be people who are deeply interested in both, it's a very rare occurrence. It's somewhat more common for a techie to burn out and switch to business, typically with mixed results. Movement in the other direction is almost never seen though though, because of the long period of study required and the drop in salary.
It's "not a problem" if you're looking for work and nobody is hiring---eg. how can there be a problem if I'm unemployed and so qualified? However, when you're looking to hire, it's damn near impossible to find anyone who 1) is damn good, and 2) is available. Good developers don't stay unemployed for long apparently---yes, there are exceptions and hardluck cases, or weird wrinkles in resumes that makes good folks unhirable. I've been in that boat myself for a few years after dot bubble. It's not pleasant.
But all in all, before the dot-com bubble, if you interview someone and ask them to do a bubble-sort or something trivially stupid, if they get it anywhere right, you know you have someone who can write programs. Now a days, I went through 7 interviews, asked each one to explain how program a queue (yes, actually write out pseudo code for a queue), and NOBODY of the 7 "developer" interviewers managed to get past setting up something equivalent to helloworld. They're helpless without libraries---and have no idea how libraries do what they do.
And the irony... most of these folks interviewed list themselves as "senior" developers with many years of experience. They can talk-the-talk, but don't appear to be able to walk-the-walk.
There are a LOT of "tech folks" out there who are dead wood. LOTS of companies are filled with them. I'd venture to guess that 90% of all "tech folks" in any IT department in any large corporation (where it's easy to get lost in the noise) are dead wood. You can fire 90% of the department without any noticeble impact on productivity. Problem is figuring out exactly who is productive---many folks are very skilled at hiding their inabilities---that hacker-looking guy in the corner who is "coding" 12 hours a day is probably the *least* productive of them all... and the slacker who shows up 2 hours late everyday is probably outperforming them all... and yet when cuts come, the slacker will be let go.
So yes, there's a problem. There are way more tech folks out there now than there were before... but it seems the number of qualified folks (those who actually can do stuff) hasn't changed much over the years.
masters in tech. The school system needs to change.
It's to long / way to much upfront with out hands on work parts.
Tech needs some like of apprenticeship system that is not tied to 2-4+ years of pure class room.
non degree qualifications need more respect as well.
There are lots of boot camps, tech / trades schools, non degree classes offed at Community Colleges, hands on learning / skills you can only really pick up on the job.
To much theory leads to skill gaps and in tech Experience is big as well more hands on classes.
college for all needs to be replaced with more vocational education and Apprenticeship programs
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-05-27/opinions/35456501_1_college-students-josipa-roksa-private-colleges-and-universities
That’s why college-for-all has been a major blunder. One size doesn’t fit all, as sociologist James Rosenbaum of Northwestern University has argued. The need is to motivate the unmotivated. One way is to forge closer ties between high school and jobs. Yet, vocational education is de-emphasized and disparaged. Apprenticeship programs combining classroom and on-the-job training — programs successful in Europe — are sparse. In 2008, about 480,000 workers were apprentices, or 0.3 percent of the U.S. labor force, reports economist Robert Lerman of American University. Though not for everyone, more apprenticeships could help some students.
The more interesting experiment would be to see what happens to their companies, ideas, and ventures should they not return...
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
End job based health insurance that is part of why they don't like older people the other is they don't like to work end less 80+ hour weeks.
So, 100 'brilliant silicon valley' types are going to open up a day plus on their busy schedules to go ride in an air plane (oh boy oh boy). For what? Nothing done on the flight could not be done in a conference call so maybe this should be a publicity stunt for Vonage instead? Hey, let me get you ninnies at BA a clue, SOLUTION NUMBER ONE STOP WASTING FUEL.
Oh yeah, and when they get off the plane in London to address the UN, who is going to tel them that the UN is in NYC?
Snakes on a plane or something?
i am SICK of these MUTHAFUCKIN REFERENCES to that MUTHAFUCKIN MOVIE!!!!!
US students spend thousands of dollars to get educated, often times saddled with enormous debt. Now they get to compete with (mostly) mediocre individuals from other countries conspiring with corporations to undercut their wages. I know it makes me want to go back to school... not. The problem is not a lack of tech skills, it's a shortage of highly skilled people willing to practically work for free. This is a problem that's going to persist until companies realize that the executives are not the ones keeping the business afloat, and the contribution they make is not commensurate with the salary they draw. It's really quite simple. To thrive as a business you provide a product, or a service. Executives don't do either one. They provide guidence and direction, and serve a necessary function, but not nearly as necessary as having people to actually do the work. The smarter people (highly skill techs for example) have figured this out, and refuse to work for peanuts because they can easily go solo and make plenty of money contracting, starting a business, etc. Why work for a bunch of self important jerks who are going to treat you like the unwashed masses?
So I don't even need a 12 hour flight to London or a conference. I'll help you out right here and now. You want to have highly skilled people working in your company? Pay them well, and treat them with the same respect that you expect.
Classifying RMS as "just a hacktivist" only highlights your ignorance. I suggest you read up on everything he's achieved (he started emacs, gdb and gcc to name a few) as a hacker before making such an unfounded claim.
The fact that RMS also cares about people and not just about sating his own technological cravings is a positive point imho, whether I agree with him or not (and I often don't)
RMS tends to undermine any "free software" argument by virtue of being a religious fundamentalist... Don't get me wrong, I'm a big supporter of free software, but RMS seems to go to great lengths to compromise on freedom in order to push his free software religion.
Example: he recommends using GPL instead of LGPL in situations where there is no reasonable competing library, in order to remove developers' freedom to use non-GPL licences for their software. Note - this isn't a consistent "everything should always be GPLed" view, he specifically says the choice of licence is down to whether or not you could use the GPL to remove other people's freedoms.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Here are the results:
- More money on primary and secondary education, esp. STEM subjects
- Better pay for STEM teachers, and financial assistance for their masters education training
- Earlier exposure of students to programming skills in languages such as BASIC
- Vast rollout of free online STEM courseware, and better PR for the offerings that are out there
- More textbooks in digital format
- More H1B visas in Western countries
- More intern positions at big companies like Google and Microsoft
Wow, I'm glad we had that air summit meeting!
So, we're experiencing this "tech skills shortage" right now. One of our network architects left for a slightly more profitable opportunity. Heck, I'm only here because the time off benefits and flexible schedules are so good, not the pay.
The organization posts the job to the company website only. Uh, great... The skill list is long. I mean sure I've got all that now, but I do the same work. I had only pieces before I came on board. I took a posting that was open for a year because they couldn't find someone to match every box (and I wanted to escape the insanity I moved into, as I discovered middle mgmt is crushed from above and can't fix things).
Honestly, we don't expect to find a match. Our skill list is too specific and long. Anyone with those skills either works for us, is happy where they are and paid better, or is totally obnoxious and we don't want them. Trying to pick someone up and train is a crap shoot, and the organization makes it very hard to dump dead weight when they don't work out.being a caring, family oriented group, it also sucks to pull people in on contract only to drop them in a few months because they don't fit we'll enough.
How does anyone get the kind of detailed tech experience we want? It's not classroom work! it's a combination of engineering fundamentals, system fundamentals, and good job training experiences. The skills are developed over years of doing the work in an environment that encourages learning not just squeezing every drop of value out of a person before replacing the, with the next one.
The guys I want to hire would be not be coming on as senior staff, they currently are doing other support work. They are known quantities that may not have the specific skills, but they have proven record of dedication, quality work, and an ability to grow. Of course, that won't happen. We'll have to do an external candidate search, and if we did open it up internally, we'd have to take some clown with a better on paper education.
How to fix it, go back to apprenticeship. Build them over time, respect them, and treat them well... Or wave lots more money. One of the running jokes is to get a raise towards a marketable salary, you leave to work a senior position elsewhere and come back in five years for a 35% raise.
... because this is what they did on Golgafrincham
12 hours is not going to sole the UK's problem that "engineers" and all of us with technical skills are considered greasy plebs" who will drip oil over the drawing room carpet.
You not going to over turn hundreds of years of history in one flight.
The problem is they clearly don't have the best of the best boffins - such as these guys:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUbjpwyesk0
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Have you ever actually tried to work on a plane? It can't be done. Assholes this stupid can't think their way out of a problem.
First-world countries (esp. USA) are suffering from a direction/leadership crisis, not a skills crisis. We have no worlds to conquer.
In the 40s, we had stop the Axis/save the world.
In the 50s, we had re-building/modernizing society.
In the 60s, we had space exploration/getting to the moon.
In the 70s, we had self-centered bacchanalia as expressed by disco, afros, nausea-inducing fashions, and other reasons drugs should remain illegal.
In the 80s, we had "the market" and increasing efficiencies in businesses.
In the 90s, we had "the internet" and globalization/the 24-7 company.
In the 00s, we had mobile and cloud services to extend the direction from the 90s.
While mobile and cloud refinements march on, everyone sits around scratching their heads and asking "now what do we do?"
We could solve energy. We could solve third-world hunger. We could solve first-world obesity. ... then we can talk about a skills gap (as if these leaders even knew what skills were needed).
We could solve any number of problems. JUST FREAKIN' PICK ONE AND GO!!
There is no "tech skills crisis". There is a "unwillingness of businesses to pay people what they are worth" crisis. The natural function of supply and demand drives prices up when demand rises. While I'm not a proponent of the free market solving all the world's ills (left to its own devices, the damage that big business could do is unacceptable, since the free market requires an informed customer base, and we don't have that), this is a situation where the market is being unacceptably manipulated by moneyed interests influencing labor markets in a way that artificially drives prices down for a given market. If you want to attract high-quality talent (and that's not a given, a lot of employers don't want "good", they want "cheap", and then wonder why their product is shit), in a sane market, you have to treat your employees better than the other guy. Since the world would apparently collapse in upon itself if employees were treated like the valuable assets they are instead of greedy, lazy, expensive liabilities that are always whining about working conditions, we have a "tech skills crisis". It's fixable. Corporate profits are at all-time highs, productivity is off the charts, yet wages have been pretty much stagnant (when corrected for inflation) for decades. It's not rocket science. Pay people more and you'll out-produce the other guy. Sure, your company's profits might drop from 17 kajillion dollars to 16 kajillion dollars, but over the long-term (no wonder they can't deal with the concept) you'll come out ahead by producing a better product. But, improving quality is hard, while treating your employees like shit by paying them less and denying good benefits is easy and saves (short-term) money.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
I think that depends on whether a student is pursuing a computer science degree or a software engineering degree. Unfortunately many schools don't provide such a distinction, but there's no reason why a true computer science student should have to do an apprenticeship. Software engineering is about using tools to create systems and products and solving real-world problems with software, so an apprenticeship would be much more applicable for software engineering students.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
No, Mr. Ballmer, we shall do no such thing. (By the way, why are you dressed like an aircraft maintenance worker today?)
Like all "golden eras"... they never were.
I just got done reading a book on Edwin Land, and one of the things the book covered was how careful he was to get his stuff patented and protected as far back as the 1920's. One of the reasons why Polaroid had essentially a monopoly over instant cameras for so long (essentially from the late 40's to the late 80's) is that they patented the hell out of every detail. Or, one can go back even further - one of the reasons Electric Boat took such an early and commanding lead in submarine construction is that back in the late 1800's-early 1900's they held several key patents on submarine design features. Even after the patents expired, the "grace period" they provided allowed EB to build up such a reservoir of capital and experience that by the 1920's they were virtually the last man standing.
The "golden era" of Silicon Valley wasn't so much about lack of patents, as it was the rapid growth of the electronics and computer industries during that time. They were very lucky in that there were several booms, mostly overlapping each other... but the boom times are gone now that industry is more-or-less mature. However, that hasn't stopped them or others from treating such boom times as $DIETY-given right.
Classifying RMS as "just a hacktivist" only highlights your ignorance. I suggest you read up on everything he's achieved (he started emacs, gdb and gcc to name a few)
You're glorifying someone who re-implemented an editor, compiler and debugger.
Big difference compared to the people who invented them.
We should end health insurance in general.
Healthcare should work like the school system. Hospitals are locally run and funded by property taxes, making their services free to anyone who walks in the door. Additional grants and guidelines on use of those grants are handed down from state and federal level. Private hospitals can be chartered but they're allowed to charge for their services (and to deny care to anyone who can't pay).
State and Federal accreditation agencies then oversee that standards are maintained at a minimal acceptable level across all institutions and redilly available ratings information allows people to compare hospitals and choose to live near a good one if they can afford to do so.
Solve a massively complicated problem that has eluded some of the best minds for years and involves solutions on a global scale in a meer 12 hours. Some might think that a publicity stunt to promote an airline but I think we can solve all the worlds problems this way. The problem is selecting the correct 100 or so people to dispose of this way for each problem. CEO's are just a starting point. Dictators, Bankers would be high on my list. The massively wealthy certain are causing a great deal of our problems.
"...coast through law school and get a job that pays well and is well-respected (I meant by regular folks, not us). "
Where have you been the last 7 years? Debt to income rates from law degrees make getting anything but profitable. I have a law degree and am pursuing a masters in computer science. You have no idea what the market looks like for new grads this is flame bait.
Any business leaders who can't figure out why there's a technical skills shortage probably also can't dress themselves, navigate public walkways or avoid urinating in public. As has been stated, ad nauseam, it's about the money and prestige. Treat skilled IT professionals with the same regard as management (IT manages machines, not people) and provide commensurate salaries and watch that shortage vanish like the morning dew.
The guy in the stockroom is "the help." The garage mechanics are "The help." IT professional are NOT the "the help," and for the enlightenment of the one or two MBAs reading this, we're smarter than you, on average. As management, you ignore this at their peril.
Everything else said about the subject is delusional bullshit - the kind of circle-jerk-in-the-echo-chamber at which recent American MBAs excel.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I still think in this scenario the solution is a FIM-92 in capable hands...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
eggs in one basket? really?
He specifically says
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html
Proprietary software developers have the advantage of money; free software developers need to make advantages for each other. Using the ordinary GPL for a library gives free software developers an advantage over proprietary developers: a library that they can use, while proprietary developers cannot use it. ...
This is why we used the Lesser GPL for the GNU C library. After all, there are plenty of other C libraries; using the GPL for ours would have driven proprietary software developers to use anotherâ"no problem for them, only for us.
However, when a library provides a significant unique capability, like GNU Readline, that's a horse of a different color. The Readline library implements input editing and history for interactive programs, and that's a facility not generally available elsewhere. Releasing it under the GPL and limiting its use to free programs gives our community a real boost. At least one application program is free software today specifically because that was necessary for using Readline.
Just as free software is not a religion, proprietary developers do not have a freedom to use libraries created by free software developers. Where did you get that idea from?
Developers in general have a right to use software under the license it was released, and RMS is suggesting that free software developers use the license that best promotes the adoption of free software.
Indeed, this is one issue where he clearly shows pragmatism, by suggesting that commonly-available libraries be released under the lesser GPL. Yet you turn this around and claim that, by doing so, he is going 'to great lengths to compromise on freedom in order to push his free software religion'.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
Exactly. Hire smart people, make it part of their job to spend one day a week in training in new tech, and you'll have no more skills crisis in no time.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Answer to turning a mediocre library-style developer who can barely code a while loop, into a star programmer who builds the libraries: Include one day a week of his work week as mandatory training in the skills that are missing.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Classifying RMS as "just a hacktivist" only highlights your ignorance. I suggest you read up on everything he's achieved (he started emacs, gdb and gcc to name a few) as a hacker before making such an unfounded claim.
The fact that RMS also cares about people and not just about sating his own technological cravings is a positive point imho, whether I agree with him or not (and I often don't)
RMS tends to undermine any "free software" argument by virtue of being a religious fundamentalist... Don't get me wrong, I'm a big supporter of free software, but RMS seems to go to great lengths to compromise on freedom in order to push his free software religion.
Example: he recommends using GPL instead of LGPL in situations where there is no reasonable competing library, in order to remove developers' freedom to use non-GPL licences for their software. Note - this isn't a consistent "everything should always be GPLed" view, he specifically says the choice of licence is down to whether or not you could use the GPL to remove other people's freedoms.
You have it backward, his belief is that you should use the GPL to prevent other developers from being able to limit the end user's freedom. Remember, developer freedom is secondary, under the GPL, to end user freedom. Every time you see an "inconsistency" just take a moment and think about it, the whole thing is about preserving the software's end user's freedom.
[Posting AC as I've already moderated ...]
I agree with many of the opinions expressed here wrt HR and why they're wrong about there being a skills shortage, but why are you telling us; "Preaching to the Converted?" You should be on HR forums telling them. They're not going to see your thoughts on /. They likely don't even know it exists. Ixquick shows plenty of potential targets for you to connect with them.
You want change? Change them.
..when they crash it in the oean.
But at least it's for a good cause.
There is no skills shortage. Greedy executives simply won't pay people a livable wage that they can live on in the desirable areas they put their companies
By that standard didn't Linus just re-implement a kernel?
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
What a Communist idea! Odd that it works so well in most of Europe.
But the US must fight that tooth and nail. Luckily, due to the health care system there, chances are lower that they still have enough teeth and nails to fight for long.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The guy in the stockroom is "the help." The garage mechanics are "The help." IT professional are NOT the "the help,"
Kettle to pot, kettle to pot, come in pot......
...put all your eggheads in one basket. Seems like your just begging for an attack.
"It's because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything." -Homer Simpson
Yep.
This premise, writ large, dates back at least to Frederick Pohl's 1982 novel Starburst . Eight varied, smart people are sent off on a long journey to a distant star. They soon discover there is no star toward which they're heading, and the whole thing was designed to get them to solve a lot of the world's problems.
Not a lot of the SF I read as a kid stayed with me into adulthood, but I still think about that one on occasion. I guess that's partly because of the fantasy that, I'm learning, appeals to so many nerds: that we might finally have time to sit down, without distractions, and "work it all out". (Now that I think of it, like Descartes at the beginning of the Meditations ...)
Thing price. I got MCSE for 2000.00 it fit on one credit card. then I got CCNA for 800.00 Give that a whirl today.
I hate to guess what those simple skills cost today.
Any and all other skill sets need the same thing. Cheap classes to learn them.
"The Problem Pit" by Fred Pohl. I forget how it ended... mass extinction? Incest? Everyone goes home happy?
Oh no, law students have to study while they work out? How terrible, they should be paid even more.
Never mind the fact that, as an engineering student, I didn't even have time to get into the gym.
I have no respect for lawyers. Leeches, all of 'em.
Put 100 regular people from an entire spectrum of society; teachers, tech profesionals, firemen, several small business owners, and see what solutions they come up with.
What we have is a pay crisis. I don't care if you're talking about cleaning out toilets with your tongue, if the pay, benefits, and work environment are right people will be breaking your doors down to work for you. What we have is a crisis of businesses willing to run the economy into the ground rather than acknowledge the principles of supply and demand.
I'll add: Link the amount of student aid available in the U.S. to the expected earnings. Engineering students == lots of aid. English majors* == little aid.
(Yes, I know there are exceptions -- we're talking *averages* here.)
The pilot? He's the guy who approved patents.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Did you somehow miss the fact that Apple broke the status quo that you just mentioned by refusing to sign cross-licensing agreements? And if you think that one-click would have passed muster as a patent in the '80s you also slept through the transition from when method patents were not allowed to the current condition where they are. Just because it was bad before doesn't mean it can't get worse.
When were these 'good old days'?
1775
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
NO ONE is willing to pay for quality programming mentoring.
Just look at how unsuccessful PHPU.cc is at just $50/month.
No one values education any more or thinks everything should be free free free, so quality products whither and die.
Slashdot Valentines Beta Massacre: iT WORKED! The boycotts killed Beta!!
Everyone expects apprenticeship systems to be free.
Just check out www.phpu.cc for a very cheap and very cost effective PHP mentoring system.
Slashdot Valentines Beta Massacre: iT WORKED! The boycotts killed Beta!!
The only problem with the so-called technical skills shortage claim is the reason behind it. Employers want guru-level skills at beggar-on-the-street prices. To do it over, I would never have begun a career in IT. After a decade and a half my experience apparently means nothing to employers. Only in IT is product-specific skills, down to the version number, a requirement. My nephew is too intelligent and smart to ever consider IT as a career. Of course by the time he graduates from high school the world will have moved past this nonsense and he'll be a visible minority.
I don't mean to sound like a troll, but that is a load of crap. There are a lot of professions for the "brightest" outside of business and tech that not only pay well but they can also enjoy.
As for not being able to enjoy a technology job, that goes the same as with everything else. Those who can simply understand technology will end up at the help desk. Those with vision will probably end up designing and implementing.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
Coast through Law School? The only people I've heard of coasting through Law School never made it all the way through or stopped coasting after the first quarter. You know how some movies show law students running on treadmills with their books in front of them so they can study at the same time? That actually happens in real life all the time.
Really? The only person I recall costing through law school was an actress in the movie "Legally Blonde". Ha! Ha! I'll have to give that a try when I begin law school, not in the USA, come September. If I could turn back time, I would only need to go back to 2005, after I developed my analytical skills as an IT consultant for a decade, and head to law school. The last eight years have been a complete waste of time to the point that I am worse off financially than in 2005. Yippee!
They are invested in the world(game) as it is today. So they have no motivation to change it.
Show me someone that will undercut their bottom line. Until then I will question their motivation.
There are no shortage of tech workers. There is only a shortage of tech workers willing to work below their market value. And a bunch of crooked business people trying to undercut the capitalistic market they supposedly support. It's the same story we hear all the time.
Where have you been the last 7 years?
Europe.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
By the way, what bloody crisis?
Came here to ask this, is it the same faux shortage of tech workers (actually a shortage of very cheap tech workers) or is it something I don't know about?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Since you lie or are ignorant in your first example the rest deserves no more consideration.
The levels of toxicity in several major rivers are outrageous - read up on the Hudson, East River, Ganges, many Chinese and Russian rivers, etc. (And yes, Russia and China are capitalist and always were, just the number of actual capitalists were kept artificially low by totalitarian regimes.) Look at all the brown and black land in and around cities (NY metro area for example) - properties too expensive to remediate even in the places where land values are the absolute highest in the world.
The levels of environmental devastation created by and not paid for or remediated by capitalist entites (for example GE) actually exceed the value they bring to the economy. Read up on externalities. Negative Externalities are slowly killing us all.
"CEOs, thinkers and venture capitalists"? I hope they bring someone who knows how to turn on their iPads for them. They *might* already know how to check their own email.
Businesses don't make the distinction either.
If you build it, we will land!!!
Yep, the real skills gap is that employers do not want to pay for skills.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Yeah, come back when you re-implement a troll!
Oh, wait, D'oh!
The guy in the stockroom is "the help." The garage mechanics are "The help." IT professional are NOT the "the help," and for the enlightenment of the one or two MBAs reading this, we're smarter than you, on average. As management, you ignore this at their peril.
If techs were so smart, they'd have the salaries and power MBAs do. I got my PhD in EE. I was probably the "smartest" of my friends in engineering school, but they all got out of engineering and switched to business either in undergrad, or shortly after graduating. I was the "smartest", and the biggest dumbass.
Smart isn't being able to churn through equations the fastest. Smart is making the best decisions. By that standard, IT professionals are morons.
Yeah, the GPL is very pragmatic... the only thing "religious" about it is that once some code converts to GPL, it stays GPL. But that's the point... to prevent people from "stealing" GPL code and making it proprietary again.
RMS came from the background of having to debug crappy proprietary code delivered from vendors. Ever read stories about what things were like in those days? Without the source code and without vendor cooperation, they were having to make binary patches to binary files to fix critical bugs in production executables and libraries. RMS wanted to put an end to that... if you deliver a software product, you need to provide the source code to the user so that user can fix your shit (or give the code to someone else to fix).
That is all. There's nothing in the GPL that explicitly says you have to put the code in the public domain! You just have to deliver the code to whomever you distribute it to. And you can charge money for both! It just so happens that since your customer is free to redistribute your code to whomever for free, that the easiest way to comply with the GPL is to publish your code on a public server... but that is not a firm requirement.
In fact, it seems ideal for banks, government, military, etc. to stipulate that all code they contract for is covered by the GPL... even code that they want to keep secret. They could buy a bunch of code from Company A, and if they mess it up, they're free to give the delivered code to another vendor Company B to fix and maintain. That scenario would be impossible under most proprietary licenses... they'd simply have to throw away just about everything delivered by Company A that they can't recompile or integrate. And the GPL wouldn't make anyone give the source to anyone else (i.e. the public) that doesn't have the binaries. I suppose the only grey area is if they piss off Company B, is Company B allowed to take the "secret" GPL'd code they got from their customer to maintain and put it out for public distribution?
apprenticeship systems does not need to be free but it not cost 20K+ a year and it does not need to last for 2-4+ years at that price.
The college system is to much one size fits all and pushing so many in to it drives up costs and Dumb's it Down as well.
Take a bunch of people you assume are smart, put them in a noisy place (a plane) for many hours which is FAR from a relaxing or though-conducive environment, in a physical locale (a jet) where discussion is unlikely... what if the person who likes your idea (or can tell you why it won't work) is half-way across the plane? Then once they're exhausted, jet-lagged, and probably in need of several good-nights' sleep, drag them in front of world-leaders to pitch half-baked ideas that they haven't had the time or resources to study the possible effects or likely efficacy of.
I bet this idea was come-up with while on a trans-Atlantic flight by someone blitzed out of his mind or higher than the airplane he was in.
Is it April 1st somewhere yet? This is the sort of stupid BS I expect to read on April 1st.
There is no global tech skills crisis. The only crisis is that there are too many people leaving technical fields because there are no opportunities (or at least in the western world). Its not easy to live in a hut with a straw mat on 1 1/2 cups of rice per day in Seattle or California, without law enforcement chasing you out from under the bridge and accusing you of squatting. You *can* do that in Bangalore, and on the outskirts of Shanghai.
Can I volunteer?
They already mentioned putting the lawers up on the plane
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
RMS is known for what he says, not what he does
Torvalds is known for what he does, not what he says
RMS talked about open source and free software philosophy
Torvalds was the engineer that made it work, and continues to be a critical cog in the engine that helps maintain Linux supremacy to this day
FOSS and Linux won't die with Torvalds, but it will be interesting to see what happens to the quality of the Linux kernel when it leaves control of its one and only real master.
India and China can solve the world's tech skills crisis with more bodies for Silicon Valley and US, EU ... CEOs. More work-visas and illegal-residents will always solve the skills problems for chicken processing, grape picking, software developing, engineering design, corporate welfare, political elections . Visas and illegal’s have solved labor crisis’s for decades now. Why not continue ?
By importing labor, we can save on education, healthcare, first responders, housing loans and provide communities for the newest and youngest amoral entrepreneurs in the drug, sex, larceny sectors of the US and EU underground economy. Religious conservative scientist would say “it’s all relativity, gods’ will.”
The more things sound the same:
In the 1700s the peasants could not survive without fealty to an aristocracy.
In the 1800s the small dirt farmers’ survival ended the big plantation farms.
In the 1900s the small businesses could not compete with national Corporations.
In the 2000s the citizens must serve the whim/will of Corporation Welfare states.
The less things appear changed for US, EU, RU, CN, IN .
Make'em sound different, and folks will think they got some difference.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?