I've found another pathology - the decision making skewed toward the "hard" decisions. I've seen a guy pick the riskier, pointless decision, because it was a "harder" decision. This, in order to claim he was saving money (he was not) instead of spending (less in one case) a little more upfront (ROI in months), and having a far better solution. But the decision was harder because it was either a change of course, or talked up that way to pad his ego and show that he was making the "difficult" choices.
Always a shortage of the best people, and that's not going to change, ever.
You are competing with the best people going into other fields, and face it, they aren't really as hard as IT. Hard problems in IT are not limited to programming, but also include systems design, troubleshooting, understanding business requirements, understanding technology capabilities and application to organizations, etc.
Why work harder in IT (even for more money) than trying to find success in another field?
In fact, it is the company and the board's responsibility not to leak information. The leaks they were investigating were in violation of rules for public companies. Whether they are supposed to initiate an investigation at all and whether what they did was legal, I don't think that's been determined. Might be a case of two wrongs don't make a right. However, the leaker they caught is almost certain to be prosecuted for securities violations.
Coding of all kinds is hard and requires discipline. It always will. So it will always be restricted to people who have both the aptitude and the initiative. Even someone who wouldn't really categorize themselves a programmer (say a web designer or report designer) will still only be slightly more numerous because the nature of the job requires certain analytical skills and discipline.
The overall lack of skilled programmers really has nothing to do with the language or a particular choice of programming paradigm - whether COBOL/BASIC/FORTRAN or something more OO or something more exotic or something less readable. Those technologies tend to be matched to problems by being the best tool for solving a particular problem in the best way.
There can always be a debate about whether it's the right way to teach it, and some people may or may not get exposed to it who could do it, but we don't lament it and make everyone take a top-notch cooking class even though some potentially great chefs may be exposed to terrible cooking teaching as a child and thus be lost to gastronomic history.
The problems programmers need to solve are programming ones, not try to subvert society to produce more programmers.
The original post is horrible, it makes it out that he was some kind of idiot savant - he worked with Hardy at Trinity, and, if he hadn't died so young, could have gone on to who knows what else.
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I've found another pathology - the decision making skewed toward the "hard" decisions. I've seen a guy pick the riskier, pointless decision, because it was a "harder" decision. This, in order to claim he was saving money (he was not) instead of spending (less in one case) a little more upfront (ROI in months), and having a far better solution. But the decision was harder because it was either a change of course, or talked up that way to pad his ego and show that he was making the "difficult" choices.
Always a shortage of the best people, and that's not going to change, ever.
You are competing with the best people going into other fields, and face it, they aren't really as hard as IT. Hard problems in IT are not limited to programming, but also include systems design, troubleshooting, understanding business requirements, understanding technology capabilities and application to organizations, etc.
Why work harder in IT (even for more money) than trying to find success in another field?
In fact, it is the company and the board's responsibility not to leak information. The leaks they were investigating were in violation of rules for public companies. Whether they are supposed to initiate an investigation at all and whether what they did was legal, I don't think that's been determined. Might be a case of two wrongs don't make a right. However, the leaker they caught is almost certain to be prosecuted for securities violations.
Coding of all kinds is hard and requires discipline. It always will. So it will always be restricted to people who have both the aptitude and the initiative. Even someone who wouldn't really categorize themselves a programmer (say a web designer or report designer) will still only be slightly more numerous because the nature of the job requires certain analytical skills and discipline.
The overall lack of skilled programmers really has nothing to do with the language or a particular choice of programming paradigm - whether COBOL/BASIC/FORTRAN or something more OO or something more exotic or something less readable. Those technologies tend to be matched to problems by being the best tool for solving a particular problem in the best way.
There can always be a debate about whether it's the right way to teach it, and some people may or may not get exposed to it who could do it, but we don't lament it and make everyone take a top-notch cooking class even though some potentially great chefs may be exposed to terrible cooking teaching as a child and thus be lost to gastronomic history.
The problems programmers need to solve are programming ones, not try to subvert society to produce more programmers.
The original post is horrible, it makes it out that he was some kind of idiot savant - he worked with Hardy at Trinity, and, if he hadn't died so young, could have gone on to who knows what else.