“you need the best and brightest involved in IT.”
I wish Princess Cruises would figure that out.
Seriously, I wonder how DEI impacts the IT area. Do companies do testing of applicants before hiring staff to be sure they’re competent? I know they used to, because I administered applicant tests. But now ... probably things have changed.
Distinguishing competent developers from incompetent ones by a test is a tricky proposition. The most relevant tests are probably puzzle-solving problems. Poorly constructed tests end up just quizzing people on minutiae that anyone can easily look up online.
The turnover is high and the individuals are significantly less capable than their predecessors. I witness basic programming flaws that were resolved twenty years go show up because the programmers have no depth of experience. Companies pretend their staff can do the work but they're learning as they go. The clients end up paying the learning and the mistakes. Adding to the problem is that client companies don't have staff with enough knowledge to properly test the deliverables prior to acceptance and implementation of the program.
I'm disappointed but no longer surprised to see new programs go live without proper testing in parallel to the existing programs. The humans then have to deal with all the fallout. I worked at a multi-billion dollar company that had several dozen analysts depart after the company rolled out a very broken planning tool. These planners weren't going to be guinea pigs and beta testers for a program that couldn't even match the program it replaced, much less offered any improvement. They weren't going to have their salaries and bonuses impacted by failures in the new tool.
We had a lot of going-away lunches in that division. The company closed a few years after I left. Their computer problems were part of larger issue. The company wasn't sold or merged; the board closed the doors and sold off the assets because it was never going to catch up.