Another day, another warning about an IT skills crisis in the UK. This time it's the British Computer Society (BCS) and Lancaster University crying foul over the decline of the local software industry with the usual suspects in the frame: a lack of young people studying computer science, the spectre of off-shoring, and lack of tech professionals with business skills.
Ironically, while decrying the poor image that IT has in wider society as a home of the socially inept, the BCS representative Elizabeth Sparrow, speaking at an event to publicise the survey, chose to use exactly the kind of language that continues to propagate the tech industry's perception issues. She described the need for some "expert nerds" while calling for more tech workers with wider skills. Names may not break bones, but bandying about terms such as "nerd" and "geek" at an event designed to address IT's image problem and lack of talent seems needlessly clumsy.
Another problem cited by Matt Bishop, senior director of Microsoft's Developer Platform Group, which sponsored the survey, is that apparently: "Young people no longer regard software as cool". Mr Bishop is right up to a point, but wrong to assume that software has ever been seen as hip or trendy by a mainstream of young people. It is not software that has lost its sheen of cool — it never had any one — it's Microsoft. The software giant enjoyed a certain kudos as an employer during its peak years in the early to mid-1990s, but is increasingly out of touch when it comes to young talent.
Not so it seems with Google, which last week brought its successful Code Jam programming competition/recruitment drive to Europe. More than 9,000 programmers entered the competition and were eventually whittled down to 50 finalists, who battled it out in Dublin for a share of prize money and potential jobs at the search giant. Interestingly, the vast majority of the Code Jam finalists were from Eastern Europe, with the top three winners hailing from Poland and Russia. The UK managed to turn out just two finalists compared to 11 from Poland.
What the UK is suffering from is not a lack of IT skills but an unwillingness to accept our new position in the global economy. Harking back to some golden age of UK engineering talent is indulgent and misguided. Just as Microsoft has lost touch with its environment and suffered as a result, so some figures in the UK tech industry have lost sight of what we should be striving to offer.
Playing tactically and discretely in lucrative niches — witness the booming UK games industry — while turning out the kind of tech managers who understand business and can be recruited into senior positions in foreign companies, seems a more realistic future. The real crisis in the UK IT industry could be a lack of imagination.
Talkback
It is just as uninformative to talk about U.K. lacking imagination, as it is talk about management rigidity or 'not-coolness'. It adds nothing much.
The real issue is the unwillingness of most people to insult U.K. culture to the core, and expose its follies, as for the most part these same follies are America's, too.
And, in particular, the richest Americans ... the ones that think they are the cause of wealth in America.
The solution lies in shedding the richest and most influential just as quickly as possible.
Witness Bill Gates ... now, persona charitabilia.
While I can see why your article sees lack of innovation as the primary lack of IT skills in the UK, this is a syptom rather than a cause. In an environment where almost all IT technology training is based on a proprietary set of software, notably Microsoft, it is not surprising that there is little innovation, but a further and more damning cause is the sheer lack of investment for those who do attempt to think out of the box. Having been intimately involved in a software startup company and watching it apply unsuccessfully for funding for the best part of ten years because the investors didn't understand the lack of Microsoft focus, I see no way for innovation to get to market. In the US where VC is still actually available there are still opportunities for inspirational entrepreneurs, but in the UK Capital is NOT venture capital it is only ever low risk investment, and government does not help by making grants and other financial implements too difficult to attain. So it is not lack of innovation, but lack of available finance that is the root cause of the problem.
Nothing short of a revolution will undo the lack in IT skills, innovation and inspiration in the UK and the EU as a whole. For that revolution to start we must first do away with the past and that past is Microsoft but mostly the US. Pure and simple. To move ahead, get ahead and stay ahead the first and only thing that needs to be done is to get rid of the US (corporate) attitude. Until we start learning not do to things backwards we're doomed to slide down the hill. The choice is simple: play under the (undisclosed) terms of some foreign entity or play under more localized terms. Define the odds of which one of those two yields better oppurtunity.