The rise and fall of the part-time techie...

Once upon a time (probably in the region of about 12 years ago), getting computer game running was a pain in the backside. Now while there were always options available for choosing a console game, the possibilities of "glorious" VGA colour and "lifelike" sound were such an allure that many were enticed towards the PC. The tax however for doing so was that you had to understand a little bit about how the PC worked. For those familiar with these times, the choice of how you used conventional memory (Extended or indeed expanded!), which drivers you could afford to bump off your autoexec.bat or as was most common, trying to find that one and only bootdisk that actually made Wing Commander work, were very common problems. The result of which, a community a love for games, but a hobbyist interest in personal computing.

So for all of the efforts to improve the consumability of software, has something been lost along the way?

Now while not for an instant am I suggesting that we return to the dark ages of spending days trying to get software to work, this forced education and basic empartment of pc knowledge managed to stimulate a community much wider than today's bedroom techies. It spawned curiosity, gave problem solving experience and exposed people to a new work of innovation and technology. Why should we care about this? Because the job market needs them.

IT recruitment is becoming an increasingly polarised marketplace. It's well documented that the number of people pursuing science, engineering and technology degrees has been dropping for some time, but as a recruiter myself there also now seems to be quite a split in quality between applicants, but not an even one. It seems that there are a lot of people now who are purely 'in it for the money'. The technology hobbyists are now very much in the minority, and in a sea of application forms that read like a history lesson in computing rather than a declaration of interest, those who passionately talk about linux, open standards and pervasive computing stand out head and shoulders above the rest.

So what can be done to engage the technologists of tomorrow? I'm certainly not advocating a return to non-startable computer games, but maybe the next generation of hobbyists can be inspired once again through the push to user generated content. There was a flurry of quality applicants in the midst of the 1st dot com boom, maybe the next evolution of the web could present the same kind of calibre of new recruits. Whether this is through the emergence of something like 3d Internet or peerhaps technologies that are not even around yet I don't know. But in the mean time, good techies are hard to find....and if you think that part is difficult, then you should try retaining them.

***

and in the mean time, if you thought it was hard getting the games running then, its even worse now! Check out this cool site for info on how to coax your old dos games back to life.