'Seriously Kelly? I may as well call YOU the unelected networks tsar' This was the week that hard-working Reg hack Kelly Fiveash came in for some flack over her presentation of Steelie Neelie's latest comments on the lack of IT skills in Europe. Kroes said in a speech at CeBIT that the European Commission had put together a €1m coalition to address the issue: This coalition is not about …
Icaza seems to be missing something. How many of us recompile the Linux kernel as often as every three weeks anyway[*]? Is he the IT equivalent of the HiFi fanatic who hears all the distortion and none of the music?
Perhaps if he didn't keep tweaking, it would just work, it's pretty good on most bits of hardware I've tried, so once he's got it stable there should be no need to change. My main desktop machine just sits there and works, with the occasional upgrade check, but that's no worse than dealing with the update mechanism on Windows or OS X. The laptop/netbooks I use are similar, although I've disabled the hibernate/suspend on the netbooks.
[*] OK, I do occasionally, but that's because it's for an embedded PC that needs a small, custom kernel.
The number of IT graduates might well be shrinking, but only because they've heard 10 years of horror stories about IT graduates being unable to find work! We all know that there was a rush to study IT related courses at degree level and that so many people did in fact graduate that the market was saturated. Not only that though, but big IT companies love to play the 'not enough skilled workers' with MPs as the excuse for moving jobs to India (where wages are lower). Ironically this also means that many people in this country cannot build their skills and resumes because the jobs are abroad which leads to a lack of skilled workers ...
So politicians hear lots of rubbish about 'skill shortages' and their answer is usually to say 'we need to encourage skilled workers to immigrate', which just compounds the problem further.
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This is true but the reason for this is that most of them simply don't make it through your average IT company's interview process, because they plain and simple don't know anything beyond the absolute minimum that they needed to learn to pass the course, which can get you a 2:1 with the right module choices, and suck at real problem solving.
In fact, most European IT graduates (and the further west you get the worse for some reason) are downright lazy, to be blunt and just did the course because "IT pays well". Compare this to the people coming from Eastern Europe and Asia and the problem isn't just "we need to get more people graduating", but of course nobody wants worry about that.
If you're a bright graduate who showed even a little initiative to learn stuff during your spare time, and I speak as someone that's been a hiring manager in the position of interviewing grads, companies will bite your arm off to have you if you manage to make it clear to the interviewer that you know what your talking about.
Perhaps your Journalist might like to repost'e the spokesperson. You've just fined MS 700 Million dollars. And you previously fined them so the total is in the billions. And yet you have no tech money, and no money in a kitty to do this. So - where did this money go? On the great EU gravy train?
The Register needs to bite back - and hard. These commisars are unelected scum bags, and they are involved in huge fines and the money disappears. And thir audits fail, and their accounts fail. And yet they sit their postulating and dictating to all around. Its disgusting.
There is NO shortage of developers, it's just that they are mostly not very good.
If you want to be a top IT guy then you have to commit to increasing your skills and knowledge and be able to demonstrate this at interviews and testing. At my current place then only about 1% make the grade to get a job offer.
Three Mile Island and Chernobyl are not comparable in any meaningful way
Regarding the Three Mile Island accident:
"The Kemeny Commission Report concluded that "there will either be no case of cancer or the number of cases will be so small that it will never be possible to detect them. The same conclusion applies to the other possible health effects".[8] Several epidemiological studies in the years since the accident have supported the conclusion that radiation released from the accident had no perceptible effect on cancer incidence in residents near the plant, though these findings are contested by one team of researchers.[9] Cleanup started in August 1979 and officially ended in December 1993, with a total cleanup cost of about $1 billion.[10] The incident was rated a five on the seven-point International Nuclear Event Scale: Accident With Wider Consequences.[11][12]" (Wikipedia)
As for the Chernobyl accident... well, you know.
Yes, but neither are comparable to the situation of Linux on the desktop, either, even (or particularly) in the terms de Icaza uses. His entire metaphor is rubbish, so why expect the components of it to make any sense?
As someone else pointed out, he's just a diva nattering on about his personal opinions, which the Reg and others have reported simply because he has a certain amount of fame in some circles. (I'm not criticizing the Reg for reporting this; industry gossip contributes to industry sentiment, and sentiment contributes to decisions that affect the industry, so gossip is relevant news. And of course we're all free to ignore stories we think are uninteresting.) It's not like de Icaza made any sort of substantive argument.
"And no we aren't as dumb as you imagine, which happens to be why a long list of the biggest ICT companies in the world want to be a part of the effort: because they know there really is a skills gap and numbers of IT graduates are shrinking right when they need to be growing"
Surprise. IT Companies that want to pay less to their employees want to ship in more people on lower wages....grrrrr!!
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