I have 2 kids, one who is ready to hit kindergarten next year. From my extremely limited parenting experience, it seems to me that just putting computers in the classroom or in students' hands isn't going to fix long standing education problems. This (in my opinion) goes double for locked down tablets like the iPad.

I'm actually not pushing computers, tablets or other electronic stuff too much on the kids. There are so many fundamentals to work on (reading, numbers, vocabulary, learning to act like a normal human) that electronics can't solve or make worse. They watch movies, watch a little too much YouTube for my taste, and play a couple of educational games. The older one knows a little about navigating around the computer, and of course every kid knows how to use an iPad/iPhone. Ask me in 14 years whether I screwed them up too badly, but it's working out pretty well just reading to them. playing with them, answering all of the 29 million 4 year old questions they have, etc.

Computers can't fix the real problems -- crappy parents, crappy home situations, low pay and low respect for teachers, etc. Every kid should be computer literate...not just phones and tablets, but able to use an office suite, look stuff up, etc. If they express an interest in coding or IT, great -- but the fundamentals of logic and scientific reasoning should take precedence. It's no reason to dump a computer or tablet into a kid's hands without a good curriculum to back it up. And from the article, it sounds like Pearson just sold the LA school district a bunch of slideware.

I'm not sure I buy the whole argument, but there is one thing that might come true. Most development frameworks are so far abstracted from the actual hardware and software dependencies that it might as well be like gluing together functionality chunks. This has and will continue to make simple application/web development more accessible. Look at iOS and Android -- lots of the hard work is done for the developer. Instead of calling into the database directly, a complex API feature optimizes the query somewhat and returns the results in a nice format. Accessing the phone's hardware is similar -- just more glue code. Web frameworks are similar, and the design goal is to make applications easier to write/maintain.

Automating development has been tried for years, as has separating dev from business logic and giving analysts the ability to write applications. (Access and Excel macros are the best I've seen so far in this category.) I think the market for the typical junior developer writing a CRUD application or web forms might be less lucrative, but someone still has to know how to interact with the hardware at a low level. The toolkits, libraries and frameworks can't write themselves.

I'm a big ThinkPad fan, but I generally go download a fresh set of drivers and run my own OS install when I buy one.

This just sounds like a PC manufacturer wanting to juice the margin a few dollars by installing some crapware. Most techies just wipe out the crapware, but the crapware vendors pay the manufacturer to put their crapware on the machine image. Unfortunately, it looks like they went one step further and installed crapware that was spyware also.

I'm surprised they thought they could get away with it -- but maybe my line of reasoning was used -- "consumers don't know the difference, pros wipe out the crapware, what's the harm?" Companies need to be prepared for the fact that people are going to disassemble, reverse-engineer and poke and prod every little thing about their products, then release detailed accounts of it all over social media and the tech blogs. It sounds like someone hasn't realized that yet or was willing to take the risk.

"I suppose it's different in the US, you do seem to equate wealth with success and happiness."

I think that more most mature people who have responsibilities, the motivation is not having to constantly worry whether you can meet your obligations. We just don't have the same labor protections or unemployment compensation that other countries (Canada, EU, etc.) do. There are a lot of people, even the responsible ones, who can't live within their means, and there is a lot of societal pressure to do so.

For me, having manageable debt and savings generates happiness. Having 2 little kids, we go through periods where we basically spend everything we make, and my happiness level goes down during those periods. For others, that happiness may only come when they have every single consumer toy they can buy, cars, a huge house, etc.

Interesting points. My experience with federal employees comes from working with regulatory agencies and from friends who work for defense contractors. In general, you're dealing with normal human people who are mired in a mess they can't really directly control. I see very similar stuff at the large corporations I've done work for -- basically a private self-perpetuating bureaucracy. The key to doing well in an environment like that, assuming you don't want to brown nose your way up the ladder, is to learn the exact minimum amount about what's needed to work the system to your ends and not to let it engulf you. If you fight it, it will roll over you -- but if you completely embrace it to the point you know every little trick, become an "insider," you'll hate working there eventually.

I imagine a lot of this just doesn't exist inside CIA/NSA and the more elite branches of the military. In that way, it probably is pretty cool for a mathematician or computer security genius to basically be given an unlimited budget and free reign to work on something extremely complex. Also, there are still some people with a strong sense of public service...if the right opportunity came along I wouldn't be against it, for example.

Agreed on the pay scales for government service as well. I almost took a job with the state university system a few years back...unfortunately it was a 20% pay cut for less interesting work. I ended up opting for the more interesting work, but it was a similar deal -- very generous time off, guaranteed permanent employment, and a decent pension. Basically, the only thing that they can offer is a stable wage progression as you gain time-in-grade, small merit increases based on reviews, and a promotional path to change your base pay. So, you really have to want to do it, or have a fun job, or love the work environment, or some combination of this.

"cyber-security is looking to be the safest career path an undergraduate could pursue."

Uh oh, here comes another surge in CS enrollment. Seriously, I just heard a story talking about how petroleum engineering undergrad programs are suffering because the oil boom is slowly settling back down. These new grads were getting six figure starting salaries when things were going great, and now things are leveling off. Any temporary spike in demand for new grads is usually smoothed over very quickly by economic forces. I would just focus on the fundamentals -- get a good solid CS education, engineering education, or whatever, and your skills will transfer if you have the talent to succeed in these fields without the artificial demand.

The first dotcom boom led to a huge jump in CS enrollment, followed by a prolonged period of un- or underemployment in the field. I still think we're working through a bunch of the first hangers-on even today that haven't been weeded out completely. Chasing a college major for money if you don't have the talent or desire just ends badly when the temporary good times end and you find yourself in a bad spot. The second dotcom boom today is generating more CS enrollment again as people want to write the hot new phone app...guess where most of them are going to be when the world moves on to something else??

The reason why the armed forces aren't getting the new grads is most likely due to culture. If you're a civilian DoD contractor, you're paid pretty well but there are a lot of political obstacles to jump over. I've worked with a lot of different types of people in my career, and the "elite cyber warriors" that would be hunting down vulnerabilities in foreign systems would probably bristle at the typical office politics situations, let alone what happens in government/military.

That said, I've always wondered how the CIA/NSA attracts super smart mathematicians, systems experts, etc. The government pay scale is very rigid. Say what you will about the NSA, but they really do seem to have a pretty big cache of talented people to do some of the things they've been doing. Beyond the idea of public service, the only thing in my eyes that makes a permanent job in government or military attractive is the stability and guaranteed retirement. I'm liking stability now that I've grown up and produced offspring, but I'm sure the typical "elite hacker d00d" straight out of college doesn't care and is most likely hostile to government.

I really wish these tax deals didn't exist. I'm on the opposite end of this problem, living in New York. Taxes are high, cost of living is high, but in my opinion quality of life is high too. Florida, North Carolina and Texas constantly go trolling for companies in high-tax states (NY, CT, MA, CA, etc.) and bribe them to move. Some of these bribes are crazy, as in, "We'll build you a headquarters, give you free utilities for 10 years, and you'll pay zero property taxes." The problem is states end up playing Prisoners' Dilemma with each other. New York does the same kind of incentives, but can't support the level of offers that no-tax states can...I think some regions of upstate NY are waiving local taxes for a certain number of years, but businesses want permanent gains. The worst thing is that the anti-tax folks whip the media up into a frenzy whenever one of these companies moves, trying to get more people onto the anti-tax side using this as an example.

The problem is that in Florida and Texas, states with no income tax, you get what you pay for in terms of services. In NY, outside of NYC, even the crappiest school districts are adequately funded and provide OK education. The state university system is good and still a bargain if you get into one of the better schools. Public services are decent in most places. In a state where you pay no income tax and $1000 a year in property taxes, you're not going to get the same level of services. I worked for one of those relocated companies, and went on a fact finding trip when they wanted to move me to Orlando. A real estate agent (who was actively trying to sell me on the idea) actually mentioned that if our kids are used to NY public schools, I would have to put them in private school to get them the equivalent. There goes all that cost savings from the cheap house and low taxes! Plus the weather sucks -- yeah, yeah, I'm weird, I like winter.

In this case, Oregon just hasn't figured out that data centers are not an employment source. Most run lights-out and employ one or two techs to swap out equipment and maintenance/security forces. Any images of 20-something developers in hip office spaces cranking out the latest phone apps are not applicable here -- they're still sitting somewhere else.

This topic is near to my heart. I grew up in the Rust Belt during the early 80s. During this time, the last of the good manufacturing jobs were being automated or offshored in my home city. We're seeing the same thing happen, but this will be a different group of people. The city has tried everything to regenerate economic growth, reorganizing the economy around "knowledge work", funding he universities and what little industry is left. The problem is that the population is largely unemployed factory workers, who have no skills and are not really trainable for "new economy" jobs. The only economic mobility for these people is winning the lottery or hitting the jackpot in a personal injury lawsuit. (I would love to see sociologists prove the negative correlation between economic mobility and number of ads for ambulance-chaser attorneys on local media.)

"That's mean", you say, "The market will take care of these people." The problem is that these peoples' lives are not going to get better. My hometown back in the day used to have auto plants, steel mills and other manufacturing that ran three shifts all year round, and they employed thousands of people per shift. The workers had stable jobs, retirements covered by pensions and union deals, and made a comfortable middle class living. They were able to buy cars, buy houses, and send their kids to college. They were even able to buy the occasional nice thing and weren't living day to day.

What's different this time? Low level knowledge work is on its way out. There are no secretaries anymore, tech support is offshored or automated, and service jobs are being replaced by machines. I can't remember the last time I went into the bank since I was able to deposit checks on my phone...see, I'm part of the problem! The next logical step is going further up the knowledge worker chain. I've worked in many corporate environments (in IT mostly) and have witnessed tons and tons of jobs that can and will be replaced by software or a changed process. That's good, right? I wonder about this -- those mid level knowledge worker jobs are the last ones in the economy that pay a decent wage for something that the average person can handle. I realize I'm generalizing, but think about this - Joe/Jane Average coasts through high school, gets into college, and parties for 4+ years. At the end, they graduate with a degree in business, psychology. communications, whatever. The economy that is about to be replaced has a place for millions of these people...corporate jobs that involve taking a stack of input work, performing a process on it, and passing it onto the output stack. These millions are the ones paying taxes, buying houses, and buying cars to commute back and forth to that office park in suburban Atlanta, Dallas, New Jersey, etc. When those jobs dry up, the same "Detroit Effect" will happen - maybe to a lesser extent, but you will have a segment of the population who isn't quite able to train to make the next step. The city I lived in was a close cousin to Detroit -- the local economy dried up and the city just started rotting from the inside. Crime went up, property got neglected because no one could afford to fix it or live in it, etc.

Solving this is going to be a monster problem, and one I hope doesn't require a revolution. But really, how do you explain to people that the answer to the next phase of the economy is to have some people not work, and have the workers subsidize that? Or tell someone that the retirement savings they built up over 40 years is now meaningless? The problem is that everything is organized around wealth and work -- nothing short of a disaster is going to easily change that. The only things I can think of are a British style aristocracy where knowledge workers become servants or other low level employees, or some sort of feudal system.

One of the problems that I have in IT is that many companies expect that new candidates have experience with all the equipment they would be expected to handle. For example, if you're a systems integration person who works in an HP shop with IBM storage and Juniper networking, it's hard to jump to a Dell/NetApp/Cisco environment. Not technically hard, mind you -- every vendor has their quirks but the same stuff gets done on everything. The hard part is convincing the interviewer that you have enough generalist skills to pick up what's needed. I regularly work with different vendors' equipment, support procedures, ways of handling patching and firmware management, storage configuration and so on. Do I go to training classes and spend months learning? No, I use my knowledge of what needs to be done at a high level and research how that particular vendor implements it, picking up what I need as I go.

That said, there are some basics I agree with the submitter on:
- A person with 20 years' dev experience should have at least encountered PKI at some point!!
- A person who just graduated from CS should be able to code a simple example without too much trouble...nothing fancy, just basic code literacy stuff.
- A person with experience managing HP equipment should at least be able to articulate what may or may not be different managing IBM/Dell/whatever equipment.

I think two things need to happen.
1. Companies need to stop hunting for the exact right person and hire someone with the expectation that they'll learn on the job. You may not be 100% ready to "hit the ground running" (I hate that phrase) but if you have the skills and desire to learn you'll figure stuff out. The company I do work for has some very proprietary stuff that no one outside of the industry knows before coming on board. It's expected that new hires take a while to become fully productive.
2. The crop of employees does need some improvement. This is way easier said than done - smart people are scared of taking a job in IT or development because of the threat of outsourcing or automation. I personally think we're still working through some of the people who got into IT in the first dotcom boom, and now we have a second phone/social/mobile/big data bubble pumping more people into the field. In this sense, I feel for employers because their hires need to have the potential to pick up the skills they need if #1 is to be achieved.

Girls-first or generally, I don't know if pushing a single field or skill ("coding") is the right idea. "Coding" is increasingly becoming stratified due to outsourcing of routine stuff. You have people working on the core guts of operating systems, VM platforms, etc. who are very high end and always in demand, but you also have a huge glut of mid- and low-level coders. These are the corporate IT developers doing Java or .NET CRUD-style applications, and it's becoming pretty clear that outsourcing is killing a lot of that work or making it less profitable. (The other elite-level coder is the serial consultant who flies in to correct the messes the outsourcers deliver, but that's another story.) There are also a whole other bunch of mid level "coders" writing phone apps or website pieces in various application or web frameworks.

I'd be more interested if there was a focus on developing core skills (logic, troubleshooting, and a comfort level with technology beyond end-user status) early on in school. People with this fundamental layer of knowledge are useful in many different fields, even non-technical ones. Pushing coding, nursing, or any other "hot, in demand" career path is going to lead to a glut of graduates who have a low skill level and limited prospects once the hot field is cold again. I do systems integration work, and I can't stand seeing "developers" who have absolutely no idea of how what they write runs in the real world. There are a finite number of both men and women who are suited for this field. Pushing more people into it rather than finding somewhere they fit better is a bad idea.

The problem is, education-wise, we tend to come back to chasing fads. I'm just barely old enough to remember in the late 80s when the Japanese were supposed to take over the world, and education systems were looking at how to apply their methods here. Then there was the finance boom, then the dotcom boom, then the real estate boom, then the second dotcom boom...who knows what's next?

It's 2015, and most of the egregious geek stereotypes have changed significantly. But, the development and IT industries are still very similar. Development is a very solitary experience, as is IT once you get out of run of the mill support. I know I've spent stretches of a few hours digging through log files, troubleshooting an intermittent problem, etc. by myself. Even with agile development, pair/team programming, and every other coding fad that makes people work together, there is a lot of time spent alone solving problems. I like doing this -- it fits my personality type. Do most women? Probably not; I'm guessing most would rather be in social situations. Do some? Sure, I've worked with a bunch.

Being married to a female, and now having a daughter, I can safely say that men and women are very different creatures. I think women self-select out of IT and development mainly for the following reasons:
- Perceived lack of socialization, and yes, the nerd stereotypes are still there to a lesser extent.
- Especially in workplaces that suck, the work/life balance is screwed up. My wife and I both work, I'm in IT and she's got a corporate finance job. We are both incredibly lucky to have good employers who don't death-march us on a regular basis. I know many more people who don't have this luxury. If you're female, and are wired like most females, you will want to take care of your children more than spending extra hours at work. I feel that way too, and this is coming from someone who really loves my job and loves digging into strange problems.
- Women are smart, and they see the writing on the wall for the IT/dev industry. Now that it's "easy" to program an application for a phone, and more aspects of systems management are automated, there will be an inevitable reduction in employment and salaries across the board. These days, you really have to be on top of your game to stay employed at the higher salaries, and be constantly learning. There are a lot of jobs that have less of the constant retraining, are more stable, and have a better balance.
- Especially in the SV startup/web/social media sphere, the rise of the "asshole brogrammer" stereotype as evidenced by many stories all over the tech press might be scaring women away too. This is kind of the opposite end of the nerd spectrum -- now that development is open to more people, the more extroverted fratboy types who got through CS are founding startups and getting themselves into sexual harassment trouble.

Do I think any of this encouragement works? Not really. I think what would work is to keep developing girls' logic, problem solving and math skills at an early age. Those who excel at these and can handle all the other crap that comes with an IT/dev job will gravitate toward it. Others won't, and we just have to live with that.

OSS stuff like Linux and xBSD is already out there, and they can build their own back doors. Microsoft already gives companies and governments access to the source code for its products. I guess the mainframe providers (IBM, Fujitsu, etc.) are the only ones left that this would affect. That, and the network device manufacturers...I could definitely see Huawei getting a boost by being the only network device manufacturer allowed to sell to Chinese banks.

I guess the question is why -- every country on earth spies on every other country and its own citizens. So, it's probably being done to boost domestic companies. One of the things that's really going to make China come out on top this century is their ability to do stuff like this...it's one of their greatest strengths. If they decide they want to do something, it's done with zero debate. Their big overarching project right now is a massive urbanization project -- just picking up millions of rural peasants and physically moving them to cities. Can you imagine the US or a European country trying something like that? It would never work, look how much people complain when a local government uses eminent domain to build a road or public works project.

The summary is right though - companies can't ignore China. There are billions of people and a huge growing middle class, all with the full will of their government pushing through whatever is needed. There are always possible bumps in the road, but I'm assuming China will be the dominant superpower in a couple of decades just because they can make stuff happen that we can't/won't.

I have heard rumors from folks that work at MS that he was basically blinded by his vision, and didn't want to listen to anybody. The result as we all know, is Windows 8.

I heard the same rumors. What's interesting is that some people (Steve Jobs, etc.) can get away with that, and others (Ballmer/Sinofsky) can't. Jobs had to literally die before Apple made a large-screen iPhone, and I don't think we'll ever see new physical buttons on an Apple product again thanks to his minimalist design manifesto.

If they actually do teach MBAs something useful, the Windows 8 case would be a perfect example. I see mini examples of this in the large companies I've worked in as well -- one person gets a hold of the decision makers, doesn't let go, and blows things up because they stop listening to criticism.