Back in the bad old days before the Internet was ubiquitous, I was the sysop of the Genealogy Roundtable on GENIE (General Electric Network for Information Exchange). It had a very primitive typed command interface that many users had difficulty mastering.
One user either couldn't print or couldn't save a file from the Genealogy Roundtable. My being in the Twin Cities and he being in Cleveland made it very difficult for me to know exactly what was on his screen. I went to Cleveland for personal reasons and as a side trip, went to his house. I forget what terms were on his screen, but he had a completely different idea what those terms meant than I did. Once I explained them to him, he was able to do what he wanted.
During this same period, I wrote a genealogy program called Family Events. One user complained that certain printed charts had lines that shouldn't be there. I couldn't visualize or understand his problem because my printed charts looked OK. It wasn't until we were both at the same genealogy conference that I understood the problem. He was using a non-Apple printer and I was using an Apple printer. As a shortcut I had given unneeded lines a negative length. The Apple printer didn't print these lines; the non-Apple printer printed them as long extraneous lines. I think once back home I recoded the problem in about an hour.
It's sort of like the urban legend of the kid who solves the problem of the truck jammed under a bridge: let some air out of the tires.
Once I wrote the above paragraph I thought of a related subject that I wanted to write about - the "shortage" of "high-tech" workers. From this thought, I changed the title of this entry from "More on problem solving" to "The learned wanted, learners need not apply". This "shortage" has been going on for decades.
The basic problem is that too many employers want somebody who can begin working on complex problems on day one. Once those problems are solved, you may be replaced by someone who can begin working on the new problems on day one.
I've never had a job that I did not require some training after I was hired – from grocery clerk to bus driver to main-frame computer programmer. My very first computer job I had to teach myself the basics of programming the company's computer. For my nearly 20-year job with Univac it was constant change and new things to learn. I didn't know FORTRAN, but I was set to finding and correcting errors in the compiler and its library. In fact, our supervisor, John Macgowan, never did learn how to write a FORTRAN program, but he was a real whiz at finding and correcting errors in the compiler. I won't bore you with the details, but it was nearly 20 years of constant learning and change. I burned out when microcomputers came on the scene and I didn't feel like Univac was keeping up. So, I started my own company and learned how to program several microcomputers without the benefit of special training.
What I didn't learn was how to run a business. Then I learned that businesses don't want new employees who will learn. That is, learners need not apply, we want the learned.
See "So-called high tech shortage".
