[TriLUG] she++: The Documentary

[Steve Litt]

On Wed, 1 May 2013 16:29:48 -0400
Aaron Joyner <aaron at joyner.ws> wrote:

> Since the topic of women in CS (and IT) seems to be the topic du jour
> lately... this seems particularly germane.
> 
> Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vPPmhQNS6I

The math in the preceding URL is an oversimplication. It's my
contention that if more women graduated in CS and IT, all that would
happen is that corporations would lobby for even more H1-B's.

Right now we have a "bench" of all sorts of experienced, Boomer aged
technologists. But corporations scream about technologist
shortages, and twist themselves into contortions explaining why,
although those Boomers did the job since the 1970's, they suddenly
don't have the "right" skills, and apparently can't learn them.

I heard this info on the radio today:

http://www.freakonomics.com/2013/05/01/its-crowded-at-the-top-a-new-marketplace-podcast/

A particularly somber sentence is this:

"We also make note in the podcast of a new paper by Hal Salzman, Daniel
Kuehn, and B. Lindsay Lowell which argues that, for all the
hand-wringing about the U.S.’s inability to educate (or import) a
sufficient number of STEM workers, there is in fact no shortage of such
workers and that only half of U.S. STEM graduates end up with a STEM
job."

That's a funeral dirge if I ever heard one, and is the reason I told my
daughters (and my son) not to follow me into IT.

Thanks,

SteveT

Steve Litt                *  http://www.troubleshooters.com/
Troubleshooting Training  *  Human Performance