Avoiding Creation of Nation of Nerds

The global shortage of skilled information technology workers is reaching critical proportions, according to a new Department of Commerce report. And the “cultural” aspects of this shortage may pose some serious dilemmas for the industry.

The difficulty--if you’ll forgive the stereotype--is that we simply can’t turn millions of people into nerds.

The boom in the high-tech industry, set in a generally high employment economy, is boosting salaries and creating a significant mismatch between the demand and the supply of skilled technologists. Everywhere, high-tech managers are complaining about the lack of talent for open positions.

Here in Austin, the growth of the semiconductor industry may be capped by the shortage of workers able to produce state-of-the-art chips. In Silicon Valley, companies are raiding each other’s employees with higher salaries, more benefits, stock options, bonuses and even incentives for current employees who find new hires.

What really vexes high-tech executives, however, is that the “pipeline” for technology-savvy workers appears to be narrowing. The Department of Commerce report (https://www.ta.doc.gov/reports/itsw/itsw.pdf), co-sponsored by the Information Technology Industries Assn., estimates that the United States will need 95,000 new technology workers a year through 2005--but only 24,553 college graduates received degrees in computer science in 1994, and the trend lines point to a flat or even downward trajectory for that figure.

Bachelor’s degrees in computer science have fallen more than 40% since 1986. In more advanced degree programs, about half of all students in technology and engineering are from other countries.

High-tech executives have hoped that workers overseas might help make up for the shortages in the U.S., and of course wages are considerably lower in programming centers such as India and Taiwan. But even these countries are experiencing shortages of skilled workers.

I contemplated this demand problem one day recently as I stood in line at the University of Texas Computer Support Center in order to change a password on one of my accounts. I overheard the questions of the other people in line and the answers of the young support technicians behind the desk. A majority of the people in line were young women, and all the technicians were young men.

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What I heard was a lot of bafflement on the part of those in line and some very dense, complicated and sometimes even cryptic answers from the support techs. It was a live example of the immense gulf that exists not only in knowledge about technology but also in a kind of predisposition of mind about technology.

Michelle Weil, a clinical psychologist in Orange, Calif., and coauthor of the recent book, “TechnoStress: Coping With Stress at Work, at Home, at Play,” estimates that about 15% of people “love” technology, while up to 25% of the population are “resisters.”

But in the vast middle are people who are not overtly “afraid” of technology and computers, but who aren’t comfortable with hardware and software that’s complicated and unforgiving of error, ever-changing jargon and the arcane methods one has to learn to do anything useful with computers.

In other words, they’re not “nerds”--a pejorative term, some people think--but like many stereotypes the word is sufficiently grounded in reality that it represents traits most people know well. A nerd is a person, usually male, who has an intense fascination with computers, software and technology in general, so much so that it dominates his behavior, appearance and world view. Bill Gates is the paradigm, the world’s most successful nerd.

The traits that people associate with nerds are not required in order to be adept with computers, but even the perception that they are contributes to the failure of some people to respond to the market’s demand for high-tech skills.

The polarity of the “techies” and the “humies,” as MIT’s Michael Dertouzos has labeled this conflict, is especially acute among women. Although there are many adept female programmers, the nerd’s world is a male one--and aggressively protected as such. The workplace of programmers, as described in an insightful new book by programmer Ellen Ullman titled “Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its Discontents,” is a place alien to many women. That exacerbates the demand problem too.

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Some years ago, when cyberspace psychologist Sherry Turkle proposed the need for “epistemological pluralism” in technical fields, in order to make space for women with different “styles” of thinking, many women already in technology reacted angrily.

They argued that this was a guarantee for second-class status in technology, and that the real problem was old-fashioned sexism, not women’s inability to learn complex technologies. The truth is probably a mix of both arguments--most women don’t embrace computers the way some men do, and the high-tech workplace is also plagued with sexism.

The Department of Commerce report and other, similar laments about the shortage of high-tech workers hammer on the need for more and better math and science education in schools. But this is likely to be a limited solution. There is too much evidence that only a small number of people, most of them men, really take to technology in its current form.

This is true even among programmers. Studies have revealed the phenomenon of the “superprogrammer,” or someone whose skills are so far superior to those of average programmers that companies often hire 10 programmers to find one superprogrammer who can do more and better work than the nine others put together. This is the product of sheer aptitude, something that is by its nature rare.

These “cultural” issues will severely affect the prospects of the technology industry unless we explore different approaches. Computers are simply too hard to learn and to use effectively. We need to use this ubiquitous technology in ways that foster and reward diverse expressions of intelligence. Rather than attempt to turn into a nation of nerds, we should reexamine the ways that we configure technology, so that it serves the rest of us equally well.

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Gary Chapman is director of the 21st Century Project at the University of Texas at Austin. He can be reached at gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu