Why is it so hard to both find work, and find good candidates for work?

I came across a webcast the other day of an interview with Peter Cappelli from the University of Pennsylvania's business school, where it was being discussed that it is employers who are to blame for the "skills shortages" that we see happening in many industries, and which in my own personal experience in particular is felt quite strongly in the IT industry.

In his interview, Peter makes some really good points about how the human resources departments in many companies have either shrunk or been made effectively obsolete, essentially removing some of the more traditional checks and balances in the recruitment process. He also mentioned how most companies put very little effort into providing skills and training any more, and how the modern screening processes where aptitude tests and applications asking lots of yes-no answers can result in finding no suitably "qualified" applicants out of a pool numbering in the thousands!! It's these last points that I feel are the most telling, and in particular when the modern day hiring processes that most companies seem to use (referred to as the Silicon Valley model) seem to embrace a zero-training + blind-screening process (a subject I have touched on before).

StackExchange, a success, and a failure.

I made a mention in an earlier post that I've been enjoying the StackExchange website for a while.  One of the things that I've been finding interesting is  how the site's Q/A format has been living up to most of the expectations that its creators had hoped for, and yet at the same time it has in a way been a failure.

Actually I find a lot more interesting about Stack Exchange than simply a view of its successes and failures, but I'm known for making the occasional bold and controversial statement so I'd better try and stick to defending my point of view without getting too far off topic.

Beautiful APIs

I am a big fan of the concept of the API.  I have been ever since I realized in the earlier part of my career that you could actually share code across program "boundaries". One of my pet gripes over the years however, is that often when people think about interfaces, they instantly think about GUIs and the most dumbed-down representations that they can get away with in order to avoid "users" getting themselves into trouble.  Even some of the more hardened API developers out there seem to find it hard to get their heads out of the mindset that a GUI is simply one type of interface, and that there are many more types that require the same attention to detail that a GUI does.

I have seen some really horrible API interfaces over the years, and truth be told I've even created a few horrible APIs of my own.  Still, it hasn't all been a mere fruitless exercise, and years of hiding away in the proverbial 'dark corner' churning out API after API has taught me a thing or two.  In that time, I guess you could say I've developed into a bit of an "API-Connoisseur", or as some of my colleagues might think of me as an "API-Snob".