ITWeb by Leigh-Ann Francis, Johannesburg, 19 Apr 2010

Latency in the skills pipeline and the undervaluation of education fuel SA's ICT skills crisis, says ScrumSense.

It is the responsibility of every ICT professional to contribute towards alleviating the skills crisis, says ScrumSense's Marius de Beer.

It is the responsibility of every ICT professional to contribute towards alleviating the skills crisis, says ScrumSense's Marius de Beer.
SA's ICT skills pipeline is broken, with the skills being fed into industry not matching the needs. For reasons that can not be explained, South Africans do not have respect for education, which is most likely why this has happened.

Business Report (Reporting by Elinor Comlay; Editing by Alex Richardson) - Reuters, April 10, 2010

The U.S. Justice Department is investigating whether some of the biggest technology companies agreed not to recruit each others' employees, violating antitrust laws, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

The investigation is looking into hiring practices at companies including Apple Inc, Google Inc, IAC/InterActiveCorp, International Business Machines and Intel Corp, the newspaper reported.

This would be a fun thing to happen in South Africa as well.

ITWeb By Farzana Rasool, ITWeb journalist. Johannesburg, 29 Mar 2010

Parliament seems to be leaning towards regulation of labour broking as opposed to banning it outright, but the matter is still being debated.

I am implacably opposed to labour broking in IT. As far as I can see it provides big corporates an excuse not to do IT right, but to muddle along randomly creating projects of no value that fail - and then the wonder why. If companies are serious about software development, they actually need a plan - that plan is not screw the workers, by the way.
If something is really worth doing - and by that I mean really - then it must be done properly. Scrum, RUP, waterfall or whatever - the project needs the correct resources and that means humans. People. Engineers. Developers.
I have seen some of the bizarre and perverse antics of our big companies, as well as the unintended consequences. Labour brokers must go - they are parasites and a scourge on the face of the IT community.
If a personnel agency / labour broker approaches me I demand 3 things
(1) their candidates must be members of IEEE / ECSA / SAIEE / BITF /
(2) they must have a 3 month notice period with their candidate
(3) their candidates must have agreed to a skills development program.

Needless to say no-one complies with my stringent requirements. Stringent, not a damn - personnel agencies get 14% of your annual salary when they place you. Regardless of whether you work for 6 months. To them you are a commodity.

And as for big companies - the fact that they give you a 1 year "contract" is irrelevant - the contract says they can fire you (they say terminate) after 2 weeks or 1 month or 3 months if you are really lucky. The 1 year is just an accounting cost-centre exercise.

Which reminds me - whoever though open-plan was conducive to good work was lying.
For big companies, labour broking is just an accounting device. It helps them get around BEE, or whatever devious things accountants dream up. It is the antithesis of good engineering.

ITWeb By Leigh-Ann Francis, Johannesburg, 26 Mar 2010

Delegates at the annual Black IT Forum (BITF) conference were disappointed yesterday by the absence of top ICT players, who failed to deliver their keynote presentations.

I think it is about time that we realise that their are no free meals with government, no matter what they say. The BITF needs to stop looking to government for their salvation. No matter what the good intentions of government (or not), it is a lumbering beast.
I am convinced that in the IT arena, there is so much value available for free, that to hitch your ride to the government train is the worst possible strategy.
I am bemused that the government encourages "entrepreneurship" as a strategy - this is a high-risk high-return strategy, which is by definition a failing strategy. A much more sensible alternative would be a growth strategy - which does not prevent someone getting lucky. But to stake your future on luck as a stratgey has to be a bad idea.

Carl Sagan led me to review the existence proof of the 5 perfect Platonic solids as a schoolboy. Beautiful maths but completely useless - this theory caused self-inflicted confusion for thousands of years.

Why is it relevant in a blog about computers and science? Well, the Not Even Wrong Popperian logic brings the relevance to science in an obvious way.

For IT policy makers, it is the sin of starting from a theory and grasping for whatever evidence to back up the theory.

What are they

In order for a solid to be a platonic solid, the figure must use the same regular polygon for all its faces and have the same number of faces meet at each of its vertices. The platonic solids and their regularities were discovered by the Pythagoreans and were initially called the Pythagorean solids.

The language of exclusion is often used in IT - "'web designers' are not real IT professionals"; "SCRUM is better than XP"; "Microsoft is better than Ubuntu"; ... This uncritical approach is not useful, intelligent or professional. Unfortunately this language of exclusion is not confined to IT, being the basis of the "ism's" - racism, etc. The problem is that it is so easy to take the language of exclusion and extrapolate its intentions arbitrarily. So that "engineering excellence" is made to become "elitism".

Linux Magazine Douglas Eadline, Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

Truth is stranger than fiction. The connection that helped end HPC careers and companies in 2009

Happy Christmas all! Back January!

WIMPs are weakly interacting massive particles hypothesised as a possible solution to the dark matter problem. These particles interact through the weak nuclear force and gravity, and possibly through other interactions no stronger than the weak force. Because they do not interact with electromagnetism they cannot be seen directly, and because they do not interact with the strong nuclear force they do not react strongly with atomic nuclei.

Does the DST control the CSIR, Meraka, the NRF and Innovation Fund as tightly as the department of health controls the MRC?

Are these organizations merely policy, implemented?

The language that I hear the denizens of the CSIR use is of sub-ordinance, yet I think the DST only socks up 15%.

What knd of oversight is there with Mintek, SKA, etc? I can't help feeling these organizations are in need of a rejuvinated mission.