How I Went In Search Of The IT Gap

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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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Civic Geek Catalog Update 11/30/2014

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The latest update for the Civic Geek Catalog is here.  We’ve got things for STEM, Video Games, and Writing enthusiasts!

The catalog is also sorted by Geekery and by Category!  154 entries and climbing!  I hope to do some resorting and mass additions over the holidays.

STEM

  • Education
    • The Hidden Genius Problem – An Oakland-based nonprofit that encourages technological skills and entrepreneurship for young men of color.
  • Equality
    • Platform – A nonprofit working to increase the participation of under-represented people in the “innovation economy.” Has an annual conference and works with YesWeCode.
  • Female Geeks
    • Tech Girls Canada – Provides national leadership for the various industry groups in Canada encouraging women in tech careers.

Video Games

  • Academics
  • General
    • GameConfs – A privately-run website that tracks and provides guides to games-related conference. Open to contributions and assistance.

Writing

  • Books
    • Books Abroad – Promotes literacy and a focus on sustainable escapes from poverty. Recycle used books, and focuses on getting people involved.
    • Borderline Books – UK-based organization collecting overstocks and damaged books and distributed them around the world.
    • GBA Ships – Runs a floating book fair – literally, a ship. A great way to help reach people around the world – and also works with community groups for supply aid and community care.
  • Equality
    • We Need Diverse Books – Focus on promoting diverse narratives in children’s literature. Reaches out to individuals and groups in children’s publishing, and is always looking for people to help out.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

Way With Worlds: The Odds

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bridge forest trees

(Way With Worlds Runs at Seventh Sanctum, Muse Hack, and Ongoing Worlds)

I’m not quite Han Solo. You don’t have to tell me the odds, but I’d like a good sense of them when it comes to your world.  But I do look good in leather.

When we play a game or ready a story, intuitively, we need to know the odds. If it’s unlikely someone can survive a fight with ten well armed Knights of The Singularity, when they win it makes us wonder how. If someone is ethnically and racially different than we expect in a game world, the impact of that difference is felt if we understand just what it means. Likelihood – and lack of likelihood – is something that we need to understand to get what something means.

I think this is instinctive to humans, and even more so in people with a vague sense of math and probability. We’re always evaluating, re-evaluating, projecting, and understanding. When math is part of our lives, even moreso. Either way, it’s human.

So the odds need to be part of your world. If they’re not, then you may be in for some problems.  If you can’t express the chances of things happening, then your world isn’t going to make sense.  People won’t be able to grasp what’s going on as their natural ability to evaluate can’t find anything to hold on to in order to make sense of the world.

(Even if you do know the odds, you might not use them right)

Lets talk what the odds are in your world, how to use them – and how not to overuse them.

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