A Dangerous Complacency

Business leaders are loudly sounding the alarm about the lack of IT skills in the country. This is a very real problem for our economic futures. While America became an economic giant in the 19th century thanks to its vast natural resources, in the 20th century it was technical innovation that gave it the edge, for example, by the invention of the transistor. In the late 20th and early 21st century, IT innovation in particular has been critical.

The out-sourcing media hype drove down CS enrollments at the beginning of the 21st century. High school students and their parents heard that the programming jobs were moving to Asia and looked elsewhere for careers. The reality is that investment in IT is still increasing and there are plenty of jobs. But the job skills that employers are looking for include not just deep technical skills, but also basic business skills including client facing and project management. (Some) CS departments are waking up to this fact and supplying these skills via courses in software engineering.

In the meantime, there is a misconception that has spread across the country: We don't need the technical skills, the technical jobs are moving to Asia, we just need to train the people who will manage the "techies" in Asia.

This is of course laughable to anyone in the IT industry (and I've seen plenty of IT industry people laugh at it). But it is also a dangerous delusion.

The economic future of the country rests on technical innovation, developing new products and services based on the intellectual capital of our people. If we become a nation of MBAs, we will squander that intellectual capital. Then the next Sun or Microsoft or Google (all formed by computer science students) won't be an American company.

It'll be a company started by some of those people that we so arrogantly figured we could get to do our "techie" stuff for us.