I’m just a werebear tech with his paws on the ground and his head in the stars.
I was able to bypass the paywall using Google Search’s “cached” view of the page.
As for the content, although I agree with some of the tentpoles to this article, the rest seems a bit saggy. It’s more of an op-ed piece without much more than subjective opinions. If the Financial Times wants to paywall this kind of stuff, they’d better make it worth the price. (This definitely wasn’t.)
If this is the quality of “independent journalism” we can expect on Twitter/X/TwiX, then let it burn to the ground. Clickbait isn’t journalism.
Speaking from years of experience in IT (nearly thirty of them), I can give my own unscientific opinion: because people put too much faith in certifications, and refuse to do any on-the-job training. You can have five of the six skills listed in a job ad, but if you don’t have that all-important sixth one, your application will get round-filed. It doesn’t matter if it would be a simple matter to train a tech on that one thing. Businesses want phoenixes for chicken scratch.
Certifications are a boondoggle, and have been for years. The tests have been rigged in such a way that candidates need to take them again and again to pass, and they get charged a fee for each attempt. The test itself is a revenue source for companies. The “prestige” those certifications bring for the companies that front them is based on their difficulty, not on their relevance or fairness.
I once attended a Microsoft certification “boot camp.” We all worked our asses off, studied the material, and most of us passed at least one test. Nobody passed all three exams except for one person. I had noticed that person using test prep software with a logo that didn’t match the stuff we’d been given. It looked like an orange DNA helix.
After the last test, a bunch of us milled around outside the building, and I asked the guy who passed how he made it through. He ran for his truck so fast that there was practically a dust cloud behind him. That’s when I decided to look up that logo on Google.
He’d been using a “brain dump” service. For those unaware of what a “brain dump” is, it’s when a third-party company sends a bunch of people to intentionally fail the exams over and over. During each attempt, those people memorize the test questions. Then the company has their plants aggregate all the possible questions in an exam pool and the correct answers to them. In effect, it’s a copy of the whole test.
Brain dumps are extremely common in IT. When I worked at VMware, many of our own employees used them to pass certification exams that were mandatory for continued employment. Those people had been doing their jobs for years. They just needed a bogus piece of virtual paper to prove it to our executive leadership. It was all about appearances.
Why is tech struggling for qualified workers?
Because it refuses to acknowledge them.
My partner’s employer recently tried this. He works for a mental health agency. That mental health agency has issues with compensation, recruiting, and retention. Yet the CEO insisted that everyone come back, despite the fact that productivity has improved with remote work. In fact, a lot of their patients prefer telehealth.
“Take a title demotion, come back into the office, or quit. Pick one.”
The mass exodus has been astounding. There’s no chance they’ll be able to fill in the gaps left by senior clinicians. Demand for psychologists is sky high right now, and just about every other employer pays more and allows telework.
The patients will be the real victims of this attempt at a “power play.”
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I don’t think people appreicate the old axiom “when you look into the abyss, it also looks into you” in this case. For a long time, corporate social media algorithms drove what content you saw. This tended to be “outrage” content, because as others have mentioned, it gets clicks. But marinate in that long enough and YOU become the source of the outrage clickbait. The algorithm starts people down that path until their mentality becomes self-reinforcing. They post what they’re used to posting – angry stuff. And they seek out more even without behind-the-scenes manipulation of their feed. Now imagine all those Twitter refugees landing in the Fediverse with that kind of outlook. It’s not surprising that outrage and bile are trending.
The way to break this cycle is… just ignore it. I have an extensive list of keyword filters on Mastodon. It screens out 99% of the political content. I just don’t want to see it. I’m here to engage with people who share the same passions and hobbies as myself. THAT’S what makes my Fediverse social media experience better. It’s not a magical function of crossing the corporate/open-source boundary. I have to be responsible for curating my feed according to what I want to seek.
The same goes for Lemmy. I’m using Leomard as my client on macOS, and it allows me to block out any Lemmy instances I don’t want to see. And I set my default view to “subscribed,” not “local” or “all.” That prevents me from getting psychologically drenched with whatever angry or trollish content might be lurking in those feeds when I open the client. I also sort by “new” rather than “hot,” “most comments,” etc. It’s great that people have opnions about things, but I find relying on up/downvotes to be a poor way of discovering the content I want.
Long story short (too late): your social media experience in the Fediverse is yours to shape. If you rely on the defaults and flow with the tide, you’ll likely end up somewhere you don’t want to be. If you trim your sails and take the wheel, there are all sorts of wonderful destinations out here.
Don’t use other people’s anger and unhappiness as your compass.
There may be no direct 1:1 solution at this time, but you can do a lot with IFTTT and Webhooks. So long as your fitness tracker’s host service (Apple, Fitbit, etc.) supports IFTTT, you could – for example – send a post to Mastodon with whatever information you desired. I do something similar with Untappd since there’s no direct integration with Masto at this time.
EDIT: I believe these are the guidelines I used to figure out my own integration. https://hyperborea.org/journal/2017/12/mastodon-ifttt/
If one is Thunderbolt and another is AirPlay, it works. I have a 50" AirPlay-capable TV mounted in my office, and a 27" 4K display on my desk. I use a cable for the 27" and AirPlay for the 50".
Reasons I use my M1 MacBook Air:
And lots more, but that’s a good start for me.
Right client, wrong operating system. It knows I’m using Leomard, but it thinks I’m on iOS. I suspect it doesn’t handle architecture detection well on Apple Silicon machines.
You’re not the hero we deserve, but you’re the hero we need.
[Salutes in English Major.]