In my previous two blogs, I wrote about Watson's big win on jeopardy compared to "smart programming" of the 2880 processors to what is available in today's IT environments
This Jeopardy contest hopefully does more than showing how fast this "Watson" really is and how brilliant the IBM folks who programmed it are. I hope it generates more interest with young people to study IT.......
Last Saturday, the front page of the largest IT Weekly in The Netherlands showed that last year (2010) fewer people opted to study IT than the previous year. Not just a small drop but, 20% fewer students! And I have read similar articles about other western economies (North America & Western Europe). It seems more and more people go for the softer studies like Marketing and Communications, but even less Math/Science "geeks" pick IT because it simply does not appeal to them. And it makes me wonder; WHERE DID WE GO WRONG?!?!?!
If you are like me, you love your job, you love the challenges and the constant complex problems you are asked to solve. You love the constant change (although it could be a bit less frequent), and the new technologies that you have to support almost on a daily basis. Maybe it is too much excitement sometimes, but a life in IT is never boring.
The problem? My own son, who is a 3rd year graduate in IT, only chose to start IT because of my enthusiasm about the things I do/see every day. The "open days" at the Universities did absolutely NOTHING to explain to new students how exciting and challenging IT can be! "We will teach you how to build an MP3 utility, how to build a compiler, some Flash", was all I heard. It was like teaching an accountant student how to build his own calculator...... Yes, we need to educate the scientists of the future how to invent technology for the 22nd century. But just as some music students will decide to become music teachers, some to play in orchestra's, some as solo-performers and some as really famous people, IT students will end up in a variety of jobs, not all as game developers or compiler builders.
We need Universities to work with "The Business" so they can attract people other than just pure computer scientists. I was never brilliant at Math, but boy, I was a fantastic application programmer. I sweated at reading dumps, but was a star in analyzing CICS, VSAM and DB2 performance reports so I could shave some extra seconds off a transaction. We need a variety of skilled IT people and not all Universities are aware of the need for a wide variety of people and their enthusiasm for different technology areas. There are two reasons for "the business" looking at off-shoring: cost and a lack of talent. A lack of talent makes hiring local people expensive and off-shoring even more attractive. As a society, we need smart people in our businesses ON SITE as well as smart people we can off-shore/outsource to. And we need them to be "business aware" IT folks. In my next blog, I will try and come up with some things we can do to change things...