Posted on 07/22/2009 3:46:20 PM PDT by devane617
WASHINGTON -- Federal agencies are facing a severe shortage of computer specialists, even as a growing wave of coordinated cyberattacks against the government poses potential national security risks, a private study found.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Guess what ~ ? ~ contract changes hands, new guys come in, they don't "share" with the natives (permanant party personnel) because, it turns out, the natives haven't had the training the contract people have so they can't really communicate.
Do this enough times and no one who is a permanent government employee in the agency will know anything at all about the data communications and processing systems the agency depends on, and all the contractors who ever worked on those items will be long gone!
Balance is still needed and always has been. Agencies should be forced to allow their natives to work alongside the Beltway bandits to learn what it is that's going on and to provide for emergency back up (like when the regular company loses the contract and they bring in these guys from Lebanon).
Cyber experts would be what they have down at the NSA.
I think what they mean is that they have a shortage of IT security guys, probably due to un-competitive wages and contractor outsourcing...
“...shortage of computer specialists”
Probably due to outsourcing. IMO Comp Sci degrees are not producing careers that appear secure for US students.
New graduates, who already realized technical specialization was thankless, now know that it won't pay anything, avoided it. Now America is screwed.
What a surprise.
There have been 3 head-on train collisions in the past 60 days in the USA. One of them occurred on July 4th weekend at Disney World. All three were due to "system malfunctions" that somehow allowed trains onto the same track.
The odds of that happening in 3 different geographically diverse systems (Florida, DC, and California) in a short timespan are *astronomically improbable*. How many head on train collisions have there been in the usa in the past decade even? One or two tops? Now three in 60 days?
There have been reports for months of stepped up hostile nation sponsored cyber attacks from North Korea and elsewhere during this same period.
I believe they have made their way into the train control systems and are crashing our trains remotely by disabling systems that detect and avert head on collisions. Whether they are doing this by internet based attacks that penetrate security, or whether they have inside help, is of course not knowable without investigation.
I have no proof other than the incredible unlikeliness of these three events. If we see additional head on collisions in the coming weeks that will be confirmation.
The same was done to the engineering/science/industrial base of the country.
Are we destined to be a nation of consultants, shop keepers and baristas?
I think the difficulty is electronic though, and probably in the Iphones and Blueberries they allow train operators to carry around with them.
>>> Comp Sci degrees are not producing careers that appear secure for US students. <<<<
Coding jobs are always targetable for outsourcing.
IT jobs that require interaction with actual live human beings on a regular basis, as well as verbal and written communication in the King’s English, are relatively unaffected by outsourcing, and will be for a long time.
You could be paranoid. You could be 100% right. You could be both. Time will tell. I'll be watching the headlines and you. Analysis later.
What about the recent crash of the flight out of Brazil? I understand that that plane was so advanced that its computer systems were constantly in touch with land-based computers elsewhere, hence the immediate references to a data record after the plane disappeared. It seems unlikely that Air France or any other airline would be advertising a security breach in on-board computers during or after its investigation, however frantically they might be working to stop such a problem ever happening again. I am a non-computerish person...I just have a daughter taking an Air France flight from Africa tonight and a son who flew overseas last night, so this was in the back of my mind when I saw this article and your comments.
You are soooo wrong. What is the national language of India? You think outsourcing only includes what you send offshore, in reality, it's the workers here on work visas who work for 50% or less that eat up IT jobs.
There may well be a nice face available to talk when needed, but there are a lot of IT departments full of folks from India who speak the “King's English” very well, thank you. Better, in fact, than most of those who have graduated with an IT degree of some sort in the past decade. US grads are so full of, “you know”, and “uhh”, that it harder to talk to a lot of them than to people who have English as a second language and care about how they speak. Sun was one company that ended up with over a third of their employees visa workers, and HP inherited a ton of those folks back when they took over DEC and they've kept more of them than the US born as they downsized that aspect of their business.
It's comfortable to think otherwise, but outsourcing doesn't just mean shipping the work overseas. It includes bringing workers here who will work for much less and often could care less about having the same benefits package.
Have a nice day
Bill Gates needs something useful to do with his bad self.
My two cents (for what it is work). I have worked in computer companies run by Chinese and by Koreans. Both companies were staffed with Indian nationals.
Both the Chinese and the Koreans had the technical expertise necessary to do the designs and coding. They however did not know English well enough to write the monthly, quarterly, and final reports. That work generally fell to native English speakers. The Indian nationals however, had both the technical expertise and the English fluency which permitted them to write the required reports. The Brits really did a favor to the Indians in the long run.
As an aside. The US had better get off its dead a$$ and start producing some top notch engineers or the future will be very bleak indeed.IMHO
Yes, that was my point in mentioning "the King's English." One can have decent to great programming or networking skills, but if one cannot speak or write in an intelligent manner, forget it.
It's comfortable to think otherwise, but outsourcing doesn't just mean shipping the work overseas.
No, it doesn't. But that was the point I was addressing.
It has seemed likely for some time to me that China intends to have the ability to take a substantial part of our civilian and military network (and power) infrastructure off-line upon demand.
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