it’s unix, not eunuchs

In 2002 at the beginning of the .bomb era, I looked into attending local colleges to improve my technology skills in a more traditional environment.  I was, after all, a veteran and had certainly earned a great deal of funds that I could spend on eduction.  Additionally, a lesser known fact is that the GI Bill times out 10 years after you leave the military.  I had already been out 3 years and had used none of my hard earned benefits.

So off I jaunted to the local websites of UMKC, KU and various small colleges in the Kansas City Metro area.  Boy was I in for a shock.  KU had a Computer Engineering program that was only suitable for churning out chip designers and electrical engineers.  I had already worked with enough Fortune 500 companies to realize that most engineers, despite their highly difficult curriculum, didn’t earn very much and were frequently unemployed.  And UMKC had a decent IT manager program, but frankly that wasn’t then, nor is it now, what I really wanted to do for a living.

I was looking for something with cutting edge wireless technology, modern programming languages, not GASP cobol and visual basic.  Perhaps a minor in encryption and open-source communities.  So I moved on to my next job, working on Sprint Nextel’s Wireless Home Location Registers, and never really looked back.

But I was keenly aware that the industry had problems.  If these fine institutions were going to churn out my future co-workers, I really didn’t know how we were going to overcome the obstacles that were clearly on the horizon.  I was very excited by all the wonderful courses that Sprint was willing to send me to, for $3500 a week shots.  Unfortunately, because the work in these courses were not graded and they rarely lead to certifications, they didn’t really prove that I knew more than people sitting next to me in class who didn’t know the difference between datatyping and teletyping.

The gap between the poor, yet affordable, curriculum of universities and the excellent hands on 12 person to a class training at very high dollar rates was a part of the problem.

Year by year, I also noticed that we were filling the business by promoting anyone who could identify a keyboard.  I worked with a guy didn’t know how to spell OSI stack and yet he was one of the guys on the firewall team protecting a half-billion dollar network.  On one team we had a C programmer who refused to use a code revision system, gather system requirements before coding and despite his 6′2″ stature, didn’t know that there was a tall men’s section in most department stores.

And young adults are not dumb.  They watched the news and heard how awful it was to be laid off as an IT worker and they observed that the programs at universities really wouldn’t give them the skills they needed.  So they signed up for other things, maybe they became English majors for all I know.  They also heard about how all the jobs are going overseas.  Well, now there are some statistics that support the fact that at least the offshoring is fueling the downward spiral.  Student’s don’t want to attend an IT program, because they figure the jobs will just go overseas anyhow: http://www.govtech.com/gt/articles/280022

During my last job search I brought this subject up with a recruiter from Megaforce.  Unfortunately I can’t remember his name, just that he worked with Becky Gray.  Apparently he had spoken with the dean of IT at KU and basically the dean had stated that no one would even apply to the program unless they started offering them scholarships.

Unfortunately I don’t know the answer to all of this.  Some offshoring is certainly useful.  And I do think that the market will take care of some of this.  But the flying cars will never get here if no one is willing to work on the technology.