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.'"
Don't forget the free and open source people too (Score:5, Funny)
Put at least Stallman, ESR and Torvalds on that plane.
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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).
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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.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUbjpwyesk0
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:4, Informative)
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.
masters in tech. The school system needs to change (Score:2)
masters in tech. The school system needs to change.
It's to long / way to much upfront with out hands on work parts.
Tech needs some like of apprenticeship system that is not tied to 2-4+ years of pure class room.
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Re:Don't forget the free and open source people to (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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I think it is quite limited what you can get all three of them to agree on. But once they do agree on something, chances are it will be a really good idea.
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.
Re:Don't forget the free and open source people to (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Don't forget the free and open source people to (Score:4, Informative)
Like all "golden eras"... they never were.
I just got done reading a book on Edwin Land [wikipedia.org], 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 [wikipedia.org] 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.
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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.
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It will be a 'mile high' orgy.. with coke and blackjack
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It will be a 'mile high' orgy.. with coke and blackjack
It will be mostly dudes.
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It will be a 'mile high' orgy.. with coke and blackjack
It will be mostly dudes.
Hey, he never said it would be a good orgy.
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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.
It's a sly pun on the "Snakes on a Plane" theme.
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 :)
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.
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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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
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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
college for all needs to be replaced with more (Score:2)
college for all needs to be replaced with more vocational education and Apprenticeship programs
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-05-27/opinions/35456501_1_college-students-josipa-roksa-private-colleges-and-universities [washingtonpost.com]
That’s why college-for-all has been a major blunder. One size doesn’t fit all, as sociologist James Rosenbaum of Northwestern University has argued. The need is to motivate the unmotivated. One way is to forge closer ties between high school and jobs. Yet, vocational educatio
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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 [wikipedia.org], for example) have made it mu
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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
non degree qualifications need more respect as wel (Score:3)
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.
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I am in Australia and have been applying for job after job without even getting an interview. I have a computer science degree and great skills in a number of technologies but no-one is willing to give me any "commercial experience" (in fact, it wouldn't surprise me if my last job doing VB.NET, SQL Server and SQL Server Reporting Services work at a state government department isn't being counted as "commercial experience" by the IT recruitment people who see my resume in the pile of other resumes)
Re:no tech skills crisis (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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I, too, was wondering what this 'tech skills crisis' was. I have yet to see it.
I see plenty of bloated ads requiring nuts skills for things I could do in my sleep, but that's hardly a crisis - that's just moron HR people copying other companies' ads out of laziness, or not really understanding the job they are hiring for.
"Thinkers?" (Score:5, Insightful)
What do venture capitalists and CEOs know about innovation?
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:"Thinkers?" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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You forgot "And how if my wishlist were fulfilled and techies treated like kings and Nobel Prize winners everything would be perfect".
What a reference... Mice for MS? (Score:2)
Those are some great people. Good thing they built this think tank and thank God we have such great people to rely on!
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.
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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.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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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 looki
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I will agree that the US labor force participation rate [stlouisfed.org] 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
Is this the 'B' Ark? (Score:5, Funny)
The rest will follow, right?
(Captcha: wartime)
I for one (Score:4, Funny)
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.
technocracy (Score:2)
implement a global technocracy
that is all we need
Wrong approach (Score:2)
They'll just spend the better part of those 12 hours to get WiFi on board.
Flight redirected (Score:5, Funny)
Flight redirected... to india!
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Flight redirected... to india!
and then hijacked by Chinese Hackers
Finally landed in North Korea
one single missile (Score:2)
just think think what a single ground to air missile could accomplish - almost as good a start as 100 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean.
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Time to dust off all the laser pointers...
"Ungrounded"? (Score:2)
Unhinged, more like.
But then any publicity is good publicity, right?
This could work (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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...that's cruel...to the snakes.
The wrong people (Score:5, Insightful)
OK fine (Score:2)
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
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Indeed. I wonder how the market taliban think this plays out in terms of their holy theories. That is - why hasn't the market reacted as it should, raising salaries for skilled people?
It is indeed weird, because that is what should have happened even if you think that markets aren't always working perfectly.
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Bull$"/? ... F % ( # Y O U
While I heartily agree with the rest of your comment, this the most eloquent part. I've reached the point where the lies are so blatantly obvious and self-serving that more refined rebuttal seems pointless. Been there done that.
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Yes
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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.
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We need to teach people how to program, not programming languages. But at the same time don't go overboard with programing / CS theory to the point of people not knowing some basic parts of programing / IT stuff.
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90% of the people think they're in the top 10%.
"Welcome to Big Talk" (Score:2)
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On the ride back, we should repeat that with European governments.
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Enough is enough! (Score:2)
What could possibly go wrong (Score:2)
On the boarding pass... (Score:2)
I turned them down (Score:2)
Mandatory Bad Pun (Score:2)
That many devs on one aircraft... makes on a plane.
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 t
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CEOs are not "geeks" (Score:2)
CEOs, venture capitlsts. To work in Silicon Valley they must be able to talk the talk, but I'll bet none of them is a "geek" as the word is used now. Though some might be adept at biting the heads off
Global Problems (Score:2)
All global problems are political problems. The technical problems can be solved in short time (about 10 years). Real problems, like a non sustainable way to produce goods, are on a technical basis easy to solve. It may take time to implement, but they are not hard to solve. For most problems solution concepts already exist. However, it will not happen until politicians are able to establish an political process to do start the transformation. The skill crisis is also only a political problem. If politics w
Flying bullshit mountain (Score:2)
They'll land with $15m VC funding, specs on which beanbags they want and a tech spec that reads "node.js + cloud".
!Geeks (Score:2)
The more interesting experiment would be to see what happens to their companies, ideas, and ventures should they not return...
End job based health insurance that is part of age (Score:2)
End job based health insurance that is part of why they don't like older people the other is they don't like to work end less 80+ hour weeks.
SNARKEMN OEFRN PLAEN (Score:2)
12 hours is not going to solve any thing (Score:2)
You not going to over turn hundreds of years of history in one flight.
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.
Solve a massively complicated problem in 12 hours (Score:2)
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All fun and games until the guy in front decides to fully recline and you no longer have space to open your laptop. Aside from the usual 'hackathon' merits and drawbacks (personally, I'm not a fan of working flat out over my weekends); why on earth would you want to do this on a plane, in a noisy, cramped environment where you get to breathe in the same recycled air for 9 hours of pure mystery... I mean "fun".
I suggest you fly in an appropriate class. On BA WTP removes that problem, obviously CW and F dont get it either.
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http://www.askthepilot.com/questionanswers/cabin-air-quality/
That site is PR for airlines. In that one article alone there is one half-truth and one lie.
The half-truth is that the pilots / crew are powerless over the work of the aircon system It states: "pilots cannot tinker with a plane’s air-conditioning systems to modify the ratio of fresh to recirculated air". They can and do. For example, on the 737 Classic and NG there are two recirc fans. Disengage the left system and the forward cabin will receive 100% fresh air and this leaks to the aft cabin ( fed
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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...
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Human nature is a technical problem.
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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.
...which iteratively solves the overpopulation problem :-)
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Condoms? No, I think they're just trying to get geeks to breed.
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The only reason I read the comments was to make sure this comment was here. Took way too much scrolling to reach, though.
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And of course there is the glaring flaw in their plan.... the skill crisis generally refers to midrange developers, people with significant skill but still clos
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Fill the unoccupied seats with patent lawyers and you've got my vote.