Two Kinds of Technology Workers (Score 1)

As far as I am concerned, there are two kinds of workers in the technology field: the talented kind and the worthless kind. Care to guess which category Mr. Richard Ellis (the author of the article) falls into? ;-) People who complain about the short life cycles of their skill set should definitely NOT be in this field. I work in this field because things progress constantly and there is always something new. As matter of fact, I refuse to take a job that doesn't involve something I haven't done before. As to U.S. colleges not teaching the latest and "greatest" programming language, that's just fine. Programming languages and OSes are just tools anyway. The important knowledge is the basic concept and theory of computing and problem solving skills. When I was in school, most upper level CS courses involve very little actual coding. Most problems are discussed in pseudo code or even essays. The professors expected people to have acquired the mechanics of coding in lower level courses and did not want to waste time in the details. This is the right approach. I learned the principle of protocol layering and basic concepts of the TCP/IP stack in school. When I actually worked with a TCP/IP stack for the first time on the job, it took me less than a week to port the stack with a telnet shell and tftp application onto my embedded platform. As others have pointed out, there _IS_ a shortage of talented technology workers whom companies are busting their asses trying to hire. Heck, I am not looking for a job but I get offers once every couple of months. On the other hand, there are also plenty of the worthless kind around just to make identifying the talented ones a little harder....