During my daily ritual of pouring over news and views from around the
world to prepare for my column, I came across an article from the land
Down Under that changed my column's focus completely. Australian
IT had a story from Diana Thorp on Tuesday about young Australian IT
professionals who are worried about the future of their industry. This
story was so shocking that you had better sit down before I go any
further in my analysis. Really, I'm being serious about this - I don't
want to be responsible for you suddenly losing control of your mental
faculties, crumpling on the floor in a heap in front of your boss and
hurting yourself. Actually, go outside and smoke 'em if you got 'em.
I'll wait.
Okay, ready? Here's the scoop: A group of young Aussies are
worried that the middle-aged men running IT companies and a slumping
economy are driving young geniuses out of high tech. Nine Australian IT
pros, all under the age of 25, have started an initiative in Australia
"to attract young people into technology careers" and "clear up
misconceptions about the industry." Shocking, isn't it? Yes, Australia
not only goes against conventional wisdom by having toilet bowl water
that drains counter-clockwise when you flush but also has no teenagers
that show an interest in computers and technology. Australia's
universities and tech trade schools apparently have been emptying due to
the harsh reality that chances are your boss is going to actually make
you work for a living and that you won't be a Ferrari-driving
millionaire before you're thirty! We better start an initiative to keep
that fantasy alive so people won't drop out of college and get a real
job fixing air conditioners!
The Australian high tech twentysomethings behind the "Youth Hub"
initiative seem like nice enough people and I'm not knocking them
personally. Most of them are upper-middle class Doogie Houser-type
Australian kid geniuses, who have made money so quickly that they are in
awe of their rapid success. Like most young people with money, these
nine IT pros have turned to activism. Their project, Youth Hub
home page is billed as a resource for placing young geniuses with
the appropriate IT career that will fulfill all their young genius
needs. Actually, it is a portal for learning about how important it is
for Australian schoolgirls to have Women in IT Role Models, an interview with a young pop singer
discussing how cool it is to be young touring pop singer and a link for
the 2002 World Congress on IT featuring topics like "Bridging the
Digital Divide" from speakers like limousine leftists Stanford law
professor Larry Lessig and former US president Bill Clinton.
What does a pop singer, high tech heroines (none of whom have regular IT
job titles like "Network Administrator" or "Java programmer", but
instead have fun things to do like "Information Futurist" and "Online
Woman Warrior") and a bunch of mostly left-wing celebrity tech wonks
speaking at a conference have to do with getting 16-25 year old
Australians the IT job they really want? Well, nothing. It's mostly
about the fantasy of how everyone with a technology job is exciting,
popular, interesting and has plenty of cash. Sprinkle the fantasy with
a topping of generic "crisis mode" activism so popular with the American
Democratic Party and you've got the Youth Hub initiative.
Notice how Justine Travers, a "Strategic Sourcing Analyst for corProcure
and high tech heroine of the Youth Hub initiative committee,
characterizes the impending danger of not having enough young geniuses
in the IT field: "If we don't start targeting youth now, we're going to
have a problem in three years." You see the crisis? The implication is
that the Youth Hub organization is the only thing that can stop the
impending destruction of IT by infusing fresh youthful blood into the
already pallid high tech industry. It's such a major crisis that an
organization had to be formed to advocate more high tech training in
schools and internships at high tech firms (put together and managed by,
you guessed it, Youth Hub). Without this kind of advocacy for youthful
techies, the Australian high tech industry will be in a crisis in three
years' time.
Unfortunately, the real crisis for the Youth Hub committee is that young
people are disbelieving the high tech hype that rocketed them to cool
sounding, high paying nonsense positions like "eStrategist" or "Internet
services ninja". The kind of venture capital that funded the e-services
dot-coms that employed e-Strategists to travel the world to come up with
e-theories on e-business dried up a year ago and won't be coming back
any time soon. Those people used to have six figure salaries a year or
two ago, but now most of them are unemployed, with few real technical
skills and are all e-screwed.
The nine members of the Youth Hub committee will do a good thing by
bringing IT companies together with educators and students, but their
hype of "the high tech industry is fun and not just twelve boring hours
a day of programming" is doing a disservice to the youth of Australia.
Perhaps nine well-paid, media-friendly, mostly white male
twentysomethings with a financial interest in signing up people on their
websites are not the most realistic of high tech industry spokespeople
for the youth of Australia. I'd want those young people to hear from
the real hard working people of the IT industry - the programmers,
network admins, help desk personnel and the rest of those
underappreciated grunts - that work the long hours and meet impossible
deadlines so the media-friendly mostly white male twentysomethings can
be so well paid in the first place.
Too bad I don't have aspirations to set up an advocacy group for high
tech industry realities. I'd probably make a bundle off selling the
names/emails of all the kids that signed up for the email newsletter to
Australian e-marketing strategists.
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