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.'"

Comments

no tech skills crisis

[dredwerker]

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 :)

Re:no tech skills crisis

[preaction]

To expound on this:

Stop asking for 100% demonstrable skills up-front. You may need to spend some time on-the-job training.

Stop paying executives so much so you can afford better workers.

Old people are not outdated. Experience is actually worth something. Use some of that money you're saving by not having golden parachutes for C-levels.

This entire crisis is manufactured.

"Thinkers?"

[Stiletto]

What do venture capitalists and CEOs know about innovation?

The wrong people

[EdmundSS]

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.

Skills Crisis ?...

[OneSmartFellow]

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

Fix the problem

[stretch0611]

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.

Re:Don't forget the free and open source people to

[erroneus]

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.