How I Went In Search Of The IT Gap

 

OK, we all know the story, or at least those of us trying to hire people with IT skills do – there’s not enough people out there to hire! We can’t find anyone. Dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria, and those empty desks that should be filled with busy geeks.

If you haven’t heard this complaint you’re A) lucky, B) ignorant, C) a liar, or D) better at hiring than a lot of people – a whole lot of people.

For over a year I’ve been hearing that there’s some kind of IT hiring gap. This isn’t new of course, complaint about some kind of “skills gap” goes back for years in many fields.  I think I’ve been hearing about this for about four years, even when unemployment was higher.

However among these claims I’d occasionally hear a dissenting voice. That there’s not a gap, or that these claims were ways to get in cheap H1B visa employees, or someone had no trouble in hiring and just thought this was BS.  It made me wonder if this is for real.

Let’s face it, it’s important to know what the heck is actually going on in IT.  IT is vital to the economy.  It’s  close to we geeks who are so tied to technology industries and areas. Some of us want a damn job and we’d like to know what’s going ob.  Some of us are trying to hire people and want to know why it isn’t working.  If this gap is BS then people claiming there is one are ignorant, deceptive, or both and we’ like to know.

So is there an IT Gap, where we don’t have enough people to do the IT jobs of today?

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Geek As Citizen: Science Awareness

Scientist Scope Technology Science

Neil deGrasse Tyson gives me hope. And not just that a relatively nerdy guy can become an intellectual sex symbol (according CERTAIN people in my twitter feed). It’s that we can make paying attention and knowing science cool again. Because we need to, and the remade Cosmos is a great start.

It seems as of late science isn’t cool.

  • Of course there’s climate change, where apparently 97% of scientists agreeing about it leaves room for controversy, especially if fat donations and speaking gigs can be wedged into that room.
  • There’s the disgusting anti-vaccination crusade that means we get measles back to kill our kids. There’s a nice story of leaving the anti-vaxx movement here or you can just stew in anger over the body count site whose URL mocks Jenny Mc Carthy.
  • Abstinence only education doesn’t work, though people still seem to think talking about it will convince people it does. Having been a teenager and remembering it, and looking at the numbers, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t.

We probably need to clone Neil deGrasse Tyson (Ok, you folks on Twitter, calm down, you know who you are). But baring the possibility of using dark technology to create an Army of Tysons* it’s up to us to enhance science awareness.

It’d kind of be par for the course.

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Geek As Citizen: To Teach

Last week I discussed how we Geeks should work to archive, organize, republish, and propagate our works – and really to encourage people to do something with what they write (or at least the good stuff). Now back to my speculations on the Geek role as a Citizen (and eventually back to this more specific speculation).

And related to publishing? I think a major role of Citizen Geeks is to teach.

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