A Shortage Of Skilled American Workers At Microsoft?

Full article here (Microsoft).

In some ways, Microsoft’s problem is an American problem: there are not enough skilled local workers, or perhaps even American workers available to do the jobs that many Indian, Asian and other foreign workers are well-trained and willing to do. On top of this, new visa restrictions are making it harder to keep even non-citizen workers in the U.S, and so Microsoft’s competitive edge is threatened.

One factor I’ve heard mentioned is the tendency in developing economies, like India’s for example, to place tremendous pressure upon their children (boys especially) to succeed in math and science, leading some to careers as software engineers. Above all, these children are responding to the economic needs of their families and their cultures, and somehow, the idea goes, America is not keeping up.

Some people I’ve talked to are wont to blame the American educational system. Kids are not getting a systematic and rigorous education in Mathematics. At the very least, they aren’t being inspired to learn about some of the deeper and fascinating counter-intuitive thinking that go into computer design, artificial intelligence, and even basic hardware maintenance.

I’m not sure where I fall on this. It’s good to attract highly skilled workers, and to have the economic and legal conditions to do so, but there could be some long-term concerns here…

Microsoft Corporation - 1978    by  Brajeshwar 

Addition:  The Economist has a piece about how Congress is making it hard to attract and keep talented workers.

Monday Poem: Walt Whitman

When I Heard The Learn’d Astronomer

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars. 

-Walt Whitman

Addition: The Chronicle Of Higher Education has a piece about Whitman.  The old poet-prophet theme.