Youth, Technology, and the Cool Factor

On LinkedIn, Bill Gates asked an interesting question.

How can we do more to encourage young people to pursue careers in science and technology?

There were many beautiful and eloquent responses, touting the need for youth to be engaged in solving the problems of the future, and how folks like Barrack Obama and Bill Gates were shining examples inspiring youth to take up that charge.

I am going to go out on a limb here.

We can talk about "the problems of the future" and "technology" and "science" until we're blue in the face. But that's only going to captivate a small slice of the pie. Granted, it might be the slice that's naturally geared towards computers anyway, but in my mind, you want to grab as much of that pie as you possibly can, to plumb the rest of them to find out if they have latent talent that they don't even realize is there.

Look around you at the youth of today. Science, technology, the environment, Web Applications, and all the things that interest us are not foremost on their minds. What is on their minds is fun, excitement and the cool factor.

Apple knows this.

And please, don't take that as an Apple Fanboi comment. I am most certainly not an Apple Fanboi. I am an ardent believer in the No Silver Bullet tenet. I've been working with Microsoft technologies for 18 years now, and still swear by them. But clearly, Apple is the winner when it comes to cool unless you're talking about desktop games. The iPod, the iPhone, OSX--they simply get out of the user's way and let them get to work and be cool when they want to do something.

Can we honestly say that about the Windows platform?

What Microsoft can do, and the technology industry in general, is make science, technology, and the problems of the future cool and fun to work on. Make it uncool not to be doing those things.

That means less emphasis on the geekiness, less technobabble, less bombarding everyone with acronyms that baffle even the most experienced developers.

Youth are excited by music, color, style, action, and the ability to do things with their friends. They're not typically excited by sitting alone in a darkened room, writing reams of code while munching on Cheetos.

You want to get youth involved in technology and science? Make it appealing to them at their level. Cut the costs associated with pursuing it for one. Higher education is simply too damned expensive. And then, change our fundamental approaches to it in school. I don't know about you, but Biology and Physics courses and my junior high school years were enough to put me in a zombie state. There was zero excitement. And I'm a science nut.

Appeal to youth; absolutely, appeal to youth. We need them. They ARE the future. Without them, we're doomed. But capture their enthusiasm early, and do it in ways that are sure to capture their imagination. Pie charts, timelines, Bunsen burners, Periodic Tables of the Elements...yeah, that's not working to capture their attention.

Interview Questions...the Flip Side of the Coin

So, I'm doing the interview thing again. It's taken me a long time to reach this point, but I'm hitting the interview trail, and seeking new employment. I've decided that I'm no longer comfortable working in a vacuum, and that what I really, deeply, truly crave is a collaborative environment and access to peers. I've been on a few interviews, and while they've gone well (a few have been grueling, and I've even gotten some offers from them), I've always found myself stumped by the end of the interview, when the interviewers turn to me and ask, "Do you have any questions?"

Now, I view an interview as an experience akin to that of buying a house or a car. Sure, the company is interviewing you, but you're interviewing them as well. It's a life-altering decision. For me, it's going to potentially set the next three to five years of my life (hopefully more, if the fit is right). But by the time I get to that part of the interview, my brain has been fried by the intense barrage of information, and I'm lucky if I can form a coherent sentence.

Today, I'm interviewing again. It'll be another face-to-face, and I'm talking to the HR director, and the technical lead. Having learned from the mistakes in the past, I wanted to have my questions for them ready up front. So, I reviewed the job posting, and the company's web site. I looked at their About Us page, and talked to a few friends about interview questions they had asked. Here are the questions I plan to ask today:

HR

• How long does the average employee remain employed at your company?
• Describe the benefits package.
• In your website, you describe the company as having a “family oriented” culture. Describe what you mean by “family oriented.”
• In general, do employees at company associate with one another after work, either as a product of work-sponsored events, or because they’ve formed friendships because of the environment?
• What is the dress code at your company?

Technology

• Has the system already been specified and fleshed out? If not, how much time has been allocated to its specification and design?
• Is the system to be designed a straight port of an existing application, or a whole new system being designed from scratch?
• How large is the current development team and how is it organized?
• Are you using automated unit testing? Refactoring? Code reviews? Any other similar processes?
• What kind of software development process is in place?
• How aggressive is the development schedule?
• Can you describe your release process to me?
• What kind of source code control system are you using? (I’ll need to know it so I can familiarize myself with it if I haven’t used it.)
• How are defects tracked, monitored, and corrected?

I'm fairly satisfied with most of my tech questions. I have a good idea what I'm looking for in the tech field. But the HR questions revolve around the culture I'm looking for, and I'm not so sure about those. So I leapt onto Google and searched technical interview questions. The results were astonishing. You can find all kinds of sites that tell people what kinds of questions to ask interviewees, but you can't find anything that tells an interviewee who wants to make sure the company's a good fit for him/her what kinds of questions might be good to ask depending on what they're looking for.

In my particular case, working with people who can help correct deficiencies in my knowledge is more important than the money. I'll take a cut in pay to get access to people and current technologies. So finding the right company is of paramount importance to me. (It's why I've turned down offers.) But what questions do you ask to verify that?

It seems to me that we could really use a good website that addresses this side of the coin. I'll keep looking for one. If anyone has any pointers, I'd appreciate a link!