Geeks On a Plane Proposed To Solve Global Tech Skills Crisis 303
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.'"
suckers (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
no tech skills crisis (Score:5, Insightful)
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 :)
"Thinkers?" (Score:5, Insightful)
What do venture capitalists and CEOs know about innovation?
Re:Don't forget the free and open source people to (Score:2, Insightful)
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).
Re:no tech skills crisis (Score:5, Insightful)
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Old people are not outdated.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.
Global crisis? (Score:5, Insightful)
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Don't forget the free and open source people to (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:no tech skills crisis (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
The wrong people (Score:5, Insightful)
Skills Crisis ?... (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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:no tech skills crisis (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Thinkers?" (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Don't forget the free and open source people to (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Don't forget the free and open source people to (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
wrong people (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:"Thinkers?" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:"Thinkers?" (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
ARGH (Score:4, Insightful)
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.