Computer Industry Recruitment Failures 6. Industry Response
One wonders, doesn’t one, if there is an issue, do we have a free market here? Will people move in to exploit the gap? Will the firms make a sensible response to address these needs?
Well, they have. I thought twice about even mentioning this in these notes. Possibly, the industry response is not worth, overall, considering. However, it’s funny, no question, and proves good points.
You’d have hoped that the industry might have established their own training. You’d have hoped they might have lobbied government. They may have made these initiatives, I wouldn’t know. But what they did publicly was self‐promote.
The Year of Code—2014
An attempt to start a campaign.
You have to understand how campaigns are run. Someone gets some opportunity, not through high enterprise, but by availability of material. They jump on the wagon as it rolls past. They grab a fellow traveller to help to run it. This is not a coordinated battle strategy. It is a play, a talk, and it needs a poster.
In this case, a group from the computing industry ‘expressed a concern’. So much so, they put up a budget for it. They roped in the BBC.
They hired a Public Relations person to do the promotion. She came on TV to say how great it was to program. The interviewer asked how easy it was to learn how to code. She admitted,
I’m going to put my cards on the table… I can’t code. I’ve committed… this year to learning to code
”Took a year!” asks the interviewer, fake astonished. ”You can do very little in a short space of time”, she replies, then backtracks,
You can actually build a website in an hour.
and so, she continues, “I’m going to see exactly what I could achieve. So, who knows…”
“I suppose it’s possible, one can always dream,” says the interviewer, aghast.
Pause.
The interviewer tries to retrieve something from the pause,
How long does it take to learn to teach to code?
The answer?
Well, I think you can pick it up in a day… it depends…
The interviewer has his eyes rolled to the ceiling. Probably thinking about the daughter of his friend who has fallen into debt, enough to buy a house, to fund her post‐graduate course in database management analysis. Or some such enlightening and personal scenario.
Doubt me? Probably still find the footage on uTube. Try “Paxman Dexter”. [Note: this footage was pulled from YouTube about a month after posting. It has never resurfaced R.C.]
Hey, but anything is possible for a Public Relations employee. Nothing like a positive outlook. A nd, as a hobby, computiing is a quieter alternative to hockey.
This Public Relations disaster (yes, P.R. can do disaster) was followed by several other ‘initiatives’. I’m picking up on a radio series on computer programmers describing their code. We got Java programmers…
Java programmers. Last thing we need, Java programmers. Well, no, beats C++ programmers, who should never be allowed in public. I didn’t listen. I asked my Mother what she made of the broadcast,
They seemed think it (Java) was very good. Could do anything.
For those readers who do not code, briefly…
Java Good,
It’s run by what is called a Virtual Engine. This has existed since the 1980’s, thirty years to the date of this writing. The work put in now makes the virtual engine the fastest and most stable of it’s kind. All those little web sites you see all over the web? A Java website will beat them for speed by a hundred times or more. And keep running.
Java Bad,
A worn‐out syntax (way of writing the code), which is not concise, clean or expressive. Java needs ten thousand programmers to say ‘Hello!’
The graphic user interface. This is the bit that puts boxes on the screen, buttons, and all that. It was called ‘Swing’, and is now in dotage years. For good reason. Slow, ugly, breaking interface guidelines, it is the worst major graphic interface by a long way. It’s only plus point is that it can do a lot, but you won’t like the results. Generations of office workers have used Swing interfaces, hating every day they switch on the computer, without knowing the responsibility lies with Java. [Note: ‘Swing’ was superceeded about four years later R.C.]
There you are (there’s more, but I’m sticking to bullets).
More interesting is why the industry felt it should promote, and promote in this way, and what it expected of the effects. They promoted in this way because they believe. You see, once upon a time, in the late 1960 and 1970s, computer coding was done by university graduates. These people had close personal relationships on a professional level. They had standards of etiquette. And computing in the general sense was very new, so there was a sense of humour and adventure.
All this was lost when computers made their way to the masses. And the masses roared for better graphics, so they could see better where to book a cheap flight for a holiday.
Computer people still yearn after those days in Eden. And they promote like this,
If only we had generations of people who played with computers, to learn about them.
English computer types promote like this,
We’re good at inventing things. We invented the computer!
Sadly ignoring the fact that any empire with stability and resources is good at inventing things. Chinese civilisation contributed papermaking, the compass, and the abacus. The Arab civilization invented the number system. A German guy invented the binary number system…
Woah there! It’s the English who invent things! We ‘invented’ the computer!
Thus, the Raspberry Pi.
Raspberry Pi
This product was launched by a foundation promoting study of basic computer science in schools. University‐based and pretty hip, they had on board the programmer of a legendary old computer game, ‘Elite’.
The Raspberry Pi is an underpowered computer with no screen or keyboard. It has no keyboard and must be plugged in to a TV, like the original home computers. It comes with no software to run, it must be coded. The idea was to train the new wave of computer programmers in the old lore.
So far, the Raspberry Pi has turned into a good, profit‐making industry. And it has been frequently deployed, interestingly, as a cheap robotics controller. You see, controlling anything by a computer is very difficult. But the Pi has plug‐in modules for sensors, to run motors, and turn on switches. Near where I live, temperature‐controlled growing sheds are controlled by multiple Raspberry Pis.
All is good, yes?
Has the Pi achieved what it aimed to do? Well, I think it’s ground level effect must have some influence, A generation of children with parents who have disposable income, who monitor that income, and conceive of computers as a valuable culture, will be brought up on the Pi, and therefore will feel more comfortable with programming.
Also, there’s a conspiracy theory that corporate industry was well‐frightened by the idea that the Pi, loaded with subversive Open‐Source software, may invade schools, and so applied the weight that changed the syllabus.
But the Pi has it’s downsides. First, the idea was strong in conception, but they were beaten to it by some dim‐bulb Texans (the SheevaPlug, still available through a company called NewIT) and Scandinavians (Bubba Two by Excito, now sold to a Canadian company). Both of these were similarly underpowered computers, whose purpose was to run the Linux operating system, for unknown purposes (website servers seemed a reasonable target). Both were overpriced, didn’t come with source‐origin glamour, and lost.
And another issue with the Pi is… ecology. Currently, countries with debt levels similar to England trash thousands of tons of computers every day. These computers are more capable than a Raspberry Pi, better built, and cheaper. A Pentium II, for example, which doesn’t need £40 of gadgets to get it up and running. All they lack is the Pi’s robotic modularity. But is that what the stated purpose is?
Righty ho
To some extent, the Raspberry PI is ecologically irresponsible. Likely, it is anti‐egalitarian. However, we might go easy on it. The lifestyle problem is not the fault of the Pi—it comes in cheap enough.
On the plus side, the Pi has opened up a whole new market in small scale computer control. Together with a loose attachment to Open Source software (not going into that here), it has opened up new ground in computing. As this is a new ground, it is a pioneer story.
But our question here was about the perceived and stated lack of computer personnel. I havn’t pushed down into this yet (probably will not), but we are not talking about the same kind of activity here at all. When the industry complains about a lack of skills, likely it wants a crew of what are called ‘Unit Testers’, with a backup crowd of PHP junkies—maybe a few Sysadmins thrown in, If you don’t know what all this means, no problem. It’s the difference between being an author and a librarian. Now, how the Pi story will contribute is not clear. A generation of small‐scale control freaks is not going to answer those needs. It’s a grim old step from making a mini‐sound‐synthesiser go ‘Wheeeee!’ to looking after the financial backups of an accounting firm. Indisputably, the Pi coders will have the skills. And the Pi market will slew the market a little, which is good.
Like any pioneer trail the Pi is doomed to become urban (though it’s effect may grow over 20 years or so). It doesn’t answer a lost couple of generations. Interesting in itself, it neither tells us if computing is short of personnel, nor answers much about how to address that.
Onwards, Next
The Fall
The days of computing Eden are over. Rich people have microchips in their toasters. It may be possible to reconstruct those days in a particular class of the population, but to disable the mobile phones in Africa, no.
Romance has an appeal. Pottering round in a shed, Richard Dyson invented the ultimate vacuum cleaner. Facts? He was a university professor, with all the access to theory, research, and materials that suggests. He worked for years at it, and made himself broke.
If anyone thinks they will get computer coders by recreating the specifics of a now irretrievable social and technological crossroads, I’m saying get out of it. No chance.
Hired PR people selling self‐achievement promotion is par for modern life. No real surprise if the public arena leaves the industry exposed. Industries far closer to the public, such as medicine, frequently behave like idiots when up on the stand (do you believe official diet recommendations? Or horoscopes? What’s the difference?) Professional bodies going public? Two effects: either talk fast and make expert, or make a jerk of yourself.
A further point. Presuming the recruitment problem exists, should we expect an industry to sort it out? That, surely, is the purpose of a state. Well, maybe some don’t believe that, but the first functions when states came into existence are defence, cooperation, suppression and education.
What we are saying is that England’s computing industry is privileged with a rosy, and partially insane, view of itself. Do you think these abstract‐heads can do the job for themselves? They may be worth a laugh, but not much else—if there is a problem, fixes will not be found here.
[Note: a few years later I encountered a firm whose approach was to train computer programmers, explicitly. They were tied into, their claim, ‘major firms’. Naturally, the firm made a lot of money. Interestingly, they were somewhat aware of this, which caused them to be embarrassed, and their embarrassment lead to the company being, at first contact, smug. Also, with very little generalised location, they needed to protect their initiative, which lead them to be rankably prejudice. But that’ a discussion for a few pages onwards R.C.]
Onwards, Next