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

Don't forget the free and open source people too

[kthreadd]

Put at least Stallman, ESR and Torvalds on that plane.

suckers

[eviljav]

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.

Re:suckers

[fustakrakich]

It will be a 'mile high' orgy.. with coke and blackjack

Re:suckers

[hughbar]

Agree, this is dot.froth to coin a new phrase and tld isn't it? Important problems aren't solved by 12 hour hacks even using 'world class experts'. If things [world hunger, war, disease, space travel] were that easy, we'd all have our togas, flying cars and vacations on the moon now. Get over it.

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Old people are not outdated.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.

Re:no tech skills crisis

[dredwerker]

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Old people are not outdated.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.

Thanks for the expound :)

Re:no tech skills crisis

[sjames]

Exactly. There are plenty of people with plenty of skills out there. If they accept the simple logic that unless they are willing to hire some people with less than X years experience in ABC, there will eventually be no people with X or more years experience left, they can make sure there will be plenty of skilled people for the future as well.

The final bit is that they'll have to understand the old adage that if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

If there was REALLY a serious shortage, they would either raise pay or offer better conditions (like 40 hour max weeks in the contract w/ more vacation time).

Re:no tech skills crisis

[Internetuser1248]

Don't forget education. The solution to any skill shortage is usually education. You are of course right though the hiring practices and working conditions play a big part in this particular one. Well that didn't take 12 hours.

Re:no tech skills crisis

[bzipitidoo]

offer better conditions

Yes! We don't mean silly little perks like free snacks, we mean fair management. Something superficial like free snacks sours real fast when crony packed bad management chooses and guides projects poorly, falls for the bullshit artists' cons, hires incompetents instead of good job candidates over stupidly discriminatory reasons such as age, demands death marches in a desperate attempt to get back on the insane schedule they created and should have discussed more before committing to it, then successfully blames the mess on the super smart techies they wouldn't heed because, well, those guys are smart and should have known better.

If there was REALLY a serious shortage, they would...

Stop screwing over US college students with bad student loan deals? And actually offer free college education. Scholarships are something, but I think that college should be paid for in the same way high school is. Stop looking at college as some sort of privilege that students ought to pay for, when the truth is that we need all those educated people to run our democracies. Instead, we've seen the forces of anti-intellectualism and greed enjoy too much success at dismantling public spending on college, out of some moral notion that people should pay their way on this matter, and for the sake of balancing budgets that are not in crisis. We don't ask high school students to pay their way, why is college so different? We are amply repaid whenever we invest in education. Asking those who have nothing to pay their way, who can't be reasonably expected to have yet held a job that pays enough to afford college, is just plain greedy, and very unfair to those who come from poor families. I hear tuition has taken quite a jump in recent years.

Re:no tech skills crisis

[jythie]

Well put. The crisis seems to be deeply rooted in HR practices from the 90s designed to remove as many people from the running as possible.

A few weeks ago I had been applying for a job that I was well qualified for except that I had not used their development language in something like 6 years. I explained that and the people I was talking to had no problem with that, in fact they had two groups and I might work with the one that was using a language I had never used.

However, as part of HR, I had to take an online exam in the language I had not used in half a decade... with a timer on each question, going over gritty little syntax details of the language. Naturally I did poorly and that was the end of the process. Another job I was doing well at applying for the HR person (final stage) decided I just didn't think in the 'XYZ way', so even though the local VP wanted to hire me, HR nixed it. Both were cases where the people actually thinking about the work felt I would be a good fit, but HR filters said no.

Re:no tech skills crisis

[Stuarticus]

There's no reason to. College students are capable of paying for it themselves and as you note, there is a "severe notion" of people paying their own way, which I think is a good notion to have. College education is a privilege. Who's going to pay for "free" college education?

You're the type of fool who would be saying the same thing about educating children in schools if you lived a hundred a years ago, just because you believe another tier of education is a privilege that requires payment of hundreds of thousands of dollars does not make it so, some of us like the idea of living in a world with a perpetually rising standard of education among the population, of course it doesn't fit everyone's selfish agenda.

Re:no tech skills crisis

[khallow]

So what do you propose to do about all decent jobs demanding a degree there days?

First, work on improving the quality of a high school education. A big driver of the degree requirement is simply that the high school diploma is pretty shoddy these days. I think school vouchers would go a long ways to make that work out.

A second driver is that a degree remains a safe way to select people. In the past, competency tests would have been widely used, but too often these have been declared unintentionally discriminatory. Apparently, recent changes (I guess this, for example) have made it much harder for employers to defend against such things. Relax the rules on discrimination so that businesses can evaluate people via exams and such.

Otherwise, they'll just pump money into politicians that will give them an unlimited number of H1-Bs and let the next generation of Americans slip into poverty.

Even if we magically fixed the above problems say by everyone getting a quality degree for free, you still have the problem that H1-Bs are indentured servants and would be preferentially employed for that reason alone. I would reform this by allowing H1-Bs to stay in country for a fixed time, whether they are employed or not and by requiring a fixed fee per visa (I don't care whether it is paid by employer or employee, but onerous loan conditions would be made illegal).

Re:no tech skills crisis

[sjames]

Somehow, I don't think bringing racism back (as a side effect) is a good approach to the problem.

Meanwhile, degree as bullet point is cheaper and easier (for the employer) than giving even a risk free test. You'd still have to somehow change that practice.

I'm all for improving high school education, but I doubt very much vouchers are the answers. If rampant loan and grant programs have driven the cost of a college education through the roof, how will a universal grant program not do the same for high school education? Put another way, fine we can have a voucher program for college since you agree vouchers will work.

"Thinkers?"

[Stiletto]

What do venture capitalists and CEOs know about innovation?

Re:"Thinkers?"

[JaredOfEuropa]

A hell of a lot... provided you get the right kind of CEO and VC, some of them are good thinkers. Good ideas are only a small part of innovation; implementing those ideas, scaling up, and fitting the idea with the culture around it (or the other way around, in other words selling the idea) comes next, and that is where a lot of start-ups fail, even though their ideas are first rate. These people know more about the markets (and its problems) than techies, and are used to think in terms of money and organisations, useful stuff if you already want to explore the feasibility and implementation of your ideas. You wouldn't want only CEOs and VCs though.

The issue I have with this is not the qualifications in general of CEOs and VCs for this sort of gathering. It is that they are part of the problem: paying techies on a decent pay scale, offering viable career paths, getting more tech savvy people into management... this stuff always comes up when companies discuss attracting more tech workers, but when they look at the bottom line they always ditch this in favour of outsourcing more stuff to India, and a few years later they're left wondering why there are so few actually capable techs left, and why so many of their projects fail. It can be incredibly hard for people to think outside the box, the danger is that the wrong kind of ideas get generated. More immigrant worker visas for example, they'll love that sort of thing.

Re:"Thinkers?"

[hairyfish]

Probably more than you're average internet keyboard warrior who pours shit on every other profession except his/her own. Really, all this place seems to be these days is a bitchfest about how useless everyone else is. Politicians suck, CEOs are jerks, MBAs are wankers VCs are idiots, Marketing are tossers, HR are arseclowns... You need to get out of your basement. Just because you don't understand it, doesn't mean it has no value.

Re:"Thinkers?"

[dunkelfalke]

No value is not really a valid description, sometimes the value of the people on your list is negative.
I mean, take a look at the ongoing banking crisis. The people that are responsible for it were supposed to be experts on their respective fields.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Global crisis?

[wirehead_rick]

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?

They'll monetize the world's problems...

[YesIAmAScript]

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.

Re:They'll monetize the world's problems...

[geoskd]

How do you expect to solve the world's problems, if your solution isn't profitable or even feasible? Assessing that is what those people are good at. By the way, no profits mean can still be successful but you'll have to go after government cash. Which is fine, but if there's profit (or mutual benefit) to be had by all parties involved, there's a much greater chance of success.

Not all of the worlds problems can be solved in the framework of capitalism. While it is a useful tool, it also has severe limitations which we haven't even begun to appreciate yet.

If you don't know what I mean, then consider the following gedanken experiment:

If we extrapolate current trends in manufacturing, service, etc, Then you will see that the most likely end result state of technology will be a "utopian" society where robots and computers do all real heavy lifting, and people are free to do as they please. All manufacturing and most design work will be done by autonomous computer controlled systems without the need for human interaction. Less than 1 in every million humans will need to be actively involved in the maintenance of society. The question then becomes: what will the rest of the people do? The answer is "Whatever they want". This is not necessarily a bad state of affairs, but it begs the question, how does this work with society and specifically, what happens to capitalism? Although no one would technically need to work to keep society working, Capitalism would require people to work to earn money for food and the like, but the need would be artificial. What could you possibly have for these people to do to "earn" their pay?

Now, before you claim that this has no bearing on our current situation, remember that this situation wont happen overnight. It will be a gradual progression from where we are now to that point, and along the way, as less and less man-hours of labor are required to maintain society, how do people stay employed? Does everyone work just one hour a year for their yearly salary?

What happens is exactly what we are starting to see worldwide: Rising unemployment, with jobs liquidating but never returning, and accelerating polarization into the rich and the poor. This is a massive problem. I can see two basic outcomes. First, humanity abandons capitalism for something else (hopefully better), or the poor revolt, and automation is banned just so that the masses can have jobs that pay the bills. and in the process a very large portion of the population is likely to starve or die fighting.

As I stated originally, not all solutions can be couched in terms of profit, so be careful narrowing your options to include only this line of thinking.

-=Geoskd

Re:They'll monetize the world's problems...

[geoskd]

You misunderstand what this all implies. Think of it this way. In the "bad old days" TM, people had to spend most of their day farming/foraging, what have you, just to support themselves. Today by contrast, money not with standing, Maintaining the American standard of living requires that less than 40% of our years are spent working. This equates to a working lifespan of 28 years out of 70. If you take the first 25 off as education, that means that the retirement age should be 53. Instead we have 60+. Over the past 50 years, we have seen an increase in the work-week, with the only real improvements in lifestyle coming from the personal computer, and health care. The personal computer has improved overall efficiency of the economy (Total producible goods and services divided by man hours required to make them), but despite that, there has been an increase in the work week. Under capitalism, the law of supply and demand will drive the value of labor to zero, as the supply will continue or increase, and the need will drop to negligible amounts. This will result in increased work weeks to make the same paycheck, and / or a decrease in standard of living. Meanwhile, the powers that own the manufacturing will increase their wealth faster and faster, until the system collapses under the imbalance. Our country survived one such set of events in the industrial revolution, but ever since that point, there has been increasing political and economic instability. The only reason we can keep the thing going is because we have been able to find ways to increase the standard of living by using excess labor (i.e. new gadgets and things to spend money on). When we run out of new things for people to buy, then the system collapses like the pyramid scheme that it is. For long term stability, we need to start looking for a system that allows us to work less and less hours as the normal course of things, as this will soak up the excess labor by converting it into consumption instead. The capitalists will hate any such idea and actively fight it because any idea along those lines will necessarily be contrary to profits, and undercut their power and money. It is too easy under capitalism to work harder to make more money, thereby forcing everyone else to work harder, and rendering others completely unemployable. This fundamental tenet of capitalism is our worst enemy, and must be overcome if we are to move forward as a nation and a world economy.

-=Geoskd

Re:They'll monetize the world's problems...

[khallow]

Today by contrast, money not with standing, Maintaining the American standard of living requires that less than 40% of our years are spent working. This equates to a working lifespan of 28 years out of 70. If you take the first 25 off as education, that means that the retirement age should be 53. Instead we have 60+.

Let's evaluate this. First, US life space is around 78. So that's 31 years of labor allegedly just to maintain standard of living (ignoring home purchases and rentals which can be 50% of income alone) You're at 56 now. In addition, we also have cover the 25 years of education. K-12 spends over $10k per pupil and per capita income is a bit over $27k. So that's roughly 4 years, plus interest, make it 5 years of income. The additional years of education tend to be more expensive and hence, I'd say you're looking at 6 to 10 years of additional work to pay for the education. You're at least at 62 years now.

Under capitalism, the law of supply and demand will drive the value of labor to zero, as the supply will continue or increase, and the need will drop to negligible amounts.

How do you explain that your theory is completely at odds with reality? The truth is that labor prices have gone up global. There has been a vast and growing demand for labor. But locally in places like the US, where there has grown a remarkable hostility to employing people, demand for labor has been culled ferociously.

For long term stability, we need to start looking for a system that allows us to work less and less hours as the normal course of things, as this will soak up the excess labor by converting it into consumption instead.

Capitalism did that in the US from the beginning of the 20th century through to the 1970s when the US started implementing extremely poor strategies in response to competition from global labor markets.

Re:They'll monetize the world's problems...

[TheSync]

I will agree that the US labor force participation rate maxed out in 1999 at 67%, and is now back to 1980 levels at 63.5%. There are lots of issues going on there (including rising college enrollment rates and baby boomers retiring), but you are correct that recent increases in unemployment did not hold back GDP growth much.

It is possible that the newly unemployed contributed so little to GDP that it did not matter much that they were no longer working.

It could have been that there were "efficiencies left on the table" that companies were forced into adopting, and that as these workers come back into the workforce, they will be able to make use of those efficiencies.

Is this the 'B' Ark?

[Anonymous Coward]

The rest will follow, right?

(Captcha: wartime)

I for one

[codeButcher]

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.

Flight redirected

[mwvdlee]

Flight redirected... to india!

Re:Flight redirected

[Prokur]

Flight redirected... to india!

and then hijacked by Chinese Hackers

Finally landed in North Korea

This could work

[sjames]

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.

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

Re:Skills Crisis ?...

[Xugumad]

Yes

Re:Skills Crisis ?...

[geoskd]

u mad?

Can you give me a good reason he shouldn't be?

The Capitalists are ruining our world. The shame is that they're slightly less bad than all the alternatives.

-=Geoskd

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

[JaredOfEuropa]

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.

Re:XKCD had a better idea.

[Xugumad]

As a recent ex-scientist (hint; I moved to software developer for the shorter hours and better pay), if we only had one problem to solve at a time, it would be much easier...

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

[MareLooke]

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)

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.

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

[TheRaven64]

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.

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

[T-Bone-T]

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.

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

[jewens]

Would that be the second plane, which by total coincidence is also the first scheduled to leave?

Flying bullshit mountain

[Xargle]

They'll land with $15m VC funding, specs on which beanbags they want and a tech spec that reads "node.js + cloud".

non degree qualifications need more respect as wel

[Joe_Dragon]

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.

Re:XKCD had a better idea.

[geoskd]

Second problem: since these are the leading minds and you execute them, the next batch will necessarily be dumber (or at best equal) than the current one.

"Leading Minds" is a highly subjective term. You have to remember that the vast majority of success is opportunity. In any given field there are orders of magnitude more people, that are capable of success, than actually have it because the majority of capable people never get the opportunity to work to their potential. This is the problem that the "tech skills crisis" fails to understand. Past performance is *not* the only indicator of future success, but it is the only one that is easy enough for an HR type person to work with. The root of the problem is that the gatekeepers to STEM jobs are liberal arts people who do not understand the jobs they are trying to fill. Although this works if you have too many candidates and need to weed out, this fails miserably when you have no perfect matches.

I can use myself as a perfect example. I have not held a tech related job in 10 years. I could still pick it up between the time I found out I had an interview, and when I actually had the interview, but no HR department will ever let my resume through because I don't look good on paper. While most of the people on /., and pretty much any hiring manager, would know the right questions to ask, and what the answers meant, the HR people don't, and it is much easier for them to return and say "no candidates met your needs", rather than finding someone who can do the job but didn't match the requirements. The fastest cure for not being able to find capable applicants is eliminating any requirement that has any reference to years of experience in it. Very few people are going to list a skill they don't have; in the tech world it is very easy to tell if someone is lying about their skillset.

-=Geoskd

SNARKEMN OEFRN PLAEN

[fishingmachine]

i am SICK of these MUTHAFUCKIN REFERENCES to that MUTHAFUCKIN MOVIE!!!!!

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

[FireFury03]

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.

ARGH

[BVis]

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.

Re:masters in tech. The school system needs to cha

[HaZardman27]

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.

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

[DerekLyons]

When were these 'good old days'?

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.