Bill Gates Road Show

Is Microsoft's Bill Gates even relevant anymore? He just finished up a 6-university tour where he's still trying to browbeat students into majoring in information technology. It remains to be seen whether his speeches will inspire anyone to change their career field.

The first paragraph of this article from eSchool News was enough to make me puke:

A widespread shortage of information technology (IT) graduates across North America is forcing Microsoft Corp. and other software companies to look to developing countries such as China to meet their needs, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates says.

“When we want to hire lots of software engineers, there is a shortage in North America—a pretty significant shortage,” Gates said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We have this tough problem: If you can’t get the engineers, then you have to have those other jobs be [relocated to] where the engineers are.”

Trust Gates to try to blame the American public for causing this "problem". According to Bill Gates and his Strong American Schools and Skills Commission cohorts, we are a nation of drooling idiots who weren't smart enough to keep our jobs during the dot-com bust, and aren't able to handle anything much above simple arithmetic when we graduate from high school. In reality, the only "problem" was the public relations fiasco suffered by Gates and other tech company CEO's when forced to confront the fact that the disappearance of IT workers and graduates was part of an elaborate plan to drastically lower labor costs. If you can downsize an entire generation of IT workers and scare their kids from any sort of technical career fields, it will be easier to contract the work out to lower-paid H-1B or L-1 visa workers, or offshore the jobs to lower cost overseas labor markets altogether. From Gates' point of view, things probably couldn't be better.

Could Bill Gates and others hire older workers who are still roaming our streets since the dot-com bust? Hmmh. It doesn't seem possible. According to David Vaskevitch, Microsoft's Senior Vice-President and Chief Technical Officer,

....younger workers have more energy and are sometimes more creative. But he adds there is a lot they don't know and can't know until they gain experience. So he says his company recruits aggressively for fresh talent on university campuses and for highly experienced engineers from within the industry. One is not at the expense of the other, he insists. For him, it is all about hiring the best and brightest—age and nationality are not important. He acknowledges that the vast majority of Microsoft hires are young, but that is because older workers tend to go into more senior jobs and there are fewer of those positions to begin with.

In other words, Microsoft needs an almost endless supply of college graduates, and needs a black hole to shovel the older workers into when they start demanding pay raises.

Why bother touring the universities and telling kids to major in IT fields? It's probably just an elaborate dog and pony show set up to convince us that Microsoft products should be appearing in every facet of our lives, and we need to be educated to use these products. As long as we keep up with our skills, and as long as he keeps nagging us that we're falling behind if we're not using all of his software, we'll keep buying his products. He can then devote his philanthropic life to destroying public schools and giving millions of dollars to private schools to make sure there are enough children who know enough about Microsoft products to keep his company afloat.