It seems young people these days aren’t dopes. They’ve seen what happened during the tech bust, and it’ll be a long time before they start trusting business talk of “wonderful opportunities in IT” again. The number of those in the West choosing to study to be programmers is plummeting, and this has business groups really worried.
But rather than doing something like, say, increasing salaries or improving benefits, business groups in the US have hit on a new strategy. They’re going to trick young people into becoming programming fodder.
“Entice kids to study programming by focusing on the ‘products’ of computer science that they’re already familiar with,” a Business Week story on the strategy says, “animated movies, video games, and social-networking sites?rather than the process of writing code. Not only does this make the discipline seem less tedious, it gives programming an element of cool.”
So researchers, in coordination with EA, have built a game to teach kids to program. That makes the whole thing seem like more fun.
“But the real return for EA will likely come years from now in the form of large pool of software programmers for hire,” the story says. “At least, that’s the hope of EA and the CMU researchers. And given the plummeting number of U.S. computer-science students, it should be the hope of everyone in the business world.”
Then, once you’ve got them trapped, you can work them hard, sack them at will, cut their pay and threaten to outsource their jobs to Asia. Man, I’m getting cynical as I get older.
http://www.brainbox.com.au/brainbox/home.nsf/link/09112006-How-to-trick-young-people-into-becoming-programmers