Dear silicon.com... young and old, clueless managers, life without Facebook

What's got silicon.com readers reaching for their keyboards this week? Reader Comments of the Week showcases how our users are responding to the latest tech news and views on the site...

Kids today
Tech-savvy school-leavers 'lack basic skills'

Youngsters may be "tech savvy" but sending text messages doesn't come into most job descriptions and having a MySpace page or Facebook entry won't qualify you as a web designer either.
-- Anthony Hunt, Maidstone, Kent

Employers have been complaining about school leavers lacking basic skills for years. The fundamental basis of education has been and should remain the teaching of fundamental skills and also teaching pupils how to learn so they can easily acquire new skills in the work place. Schools are not a factory for providing employers with ready made employees.
-- Nick Morgan, Bath

Editor's choice

silicon.com editor Tony Hallett flags up his picks on the site this week...

♦ CIO Essentials: Email stress, spam threats and "broken" IT...
♦ Video: How to stop your best staff leaving
♦ From CIO to Consultant: Where did all this work come from?
♦ Minority Report: A greener Apple
♦ Skills Survey 2007: Offshoring still a hot potato

Muddled management
Peter Cochrane's Blog: Know-nothing managers

Today's number crunching managers simply do not have a clue in times of crisis, times when you or I and many more of our age group would have rolled up our sleeves and mucked-in. Even better, we enjoyed getting the job done.
-- Jim Price, Kenilworth

Bravo Peter! I frequently find my similar fears, that today's IT Directors are too obsessed with promotion to the Board and yet don't understand their own business, are shared with a wide cross-section of the industry. This is a recipe for an added vacuum, not value! No wonder that businesses are looking to place their own high flyers in charge of IT - at least one of the bases is covered!
-- Ian Osbourne, London

Ideally a manager should have broad view of organisation, be able to grasp detail, contribute to discussion, be a mentor and not abuse their role with selfish objectives nor be protective of knowledge.

A hands-on manager can be a major constraint if their sense of practicality is limited, old fashioned, not dynamic or forward thinking.

A risk is that managers can assume they are special and think they can make clever judgements. In reality they should be co-ordinators and mostly should get less salary than the people they work with. The challenge to managers is that most of their work can be replaced by workflow systems and most are too selfish to entertain.
-- Dave Yearsley, Essex

Know-nothing-managers are not a new phenomenon. 'Twas ever thus. I have been in this industry for 54 years, and in that time have had only 5 managers who knew what they were doing and had enough charisma to inspire me to perform. Two of them were women, one half my age.

The rest were macho numb-skulls with good teeth, a head for numbers, a loud mouth and an overwhelming desire to move on to the next job. I am cheered to find that they burnt out or were found out before they hit 55. They are no longer with us. Sadly, they seem to be replaced with people just like them.
-- Richard Sarson, Wimbledon

Blame the economics of IT. Increasing customer demands and shrinking budgets. Increasing manager-to-doer ratios to keep costs down.

Managers spending 8 hours a day pushing the numbers to prove things are on budget. Another 2-4 hrs a day trying to manage the technical team and help with problems. If they want to get home to their spouses and kids at a semi-decent time there is no time to keep up with the accelerating developments in the industry. They are judged and rewarded on delivering on time and to budget so why is anyone surprised that that is where their focus is?
-- Anonymous, South East England

Age concern
"Rife" ageism causing IT skills crisis?

There has always been ageism and there always will be. If you keep technical skills up to date and apply for jobs requiring them, you're "over-qualified". Luckily I'm more interested in working because I enjoy it than because I need the money but I feel sorry for those around 50 whose experience of IT and projects is just shunted aside.

It won't stop but that doesn't mean it isn't worth highlighting.
-- Anonymous, London

IT ability is related to ability and experience generally. Perhaps everyone applying for a job should be blind-tested, with no information about the person being given to selectors.
-- Anonymous, London

A cyber crime story
Police: We want more info on e-crime attacks

We recently averted acceptance of fraudulent Visa and MasterCard payments by a person pretending to be a travel agent in Glasgow using stolen card details: we reported the crime to Glasgow Police offering to give the perpetrator's identity and postal address: their response was that we should not be reporting the attempted fraud to them but to our local police here in France: they were totally disinterested in spite of the fact that our information would have led them directly to the criminal's front door. What hope is there of stopping cyber crime, also theft of card identities if the Police (and our own bank's fraud department) are not prepared to follow up good information from victims?
-- Chris Eyre, France

I can't live without Facebook
Facebook banned by half of employers

I haven't really got a comment but as my employer has blocked Facebook I am using Silicon's on-line comment system to let people know I am still alive. (Please send me fish for my Facebook Aquarium.) I am currently at work.
-- Simon Cox, London

Does it matter what employees actually do during the day as long as it's not illegal. Shouldn't employers be more concerned about the output of their staff rather than "clock watching" or have we just replaced one outmoded left over from the industrial revolution with the modern equivalent!

Perhaps if companies let their employees use more web based tools they might have a better window into what happens in the "real world".
-- Anonymous, London

Please note, comments may be edited for clarity - but are not corrected for grammar, spelling, punctuation or style. The views expressed are not necessarily the views of silicon.com. You can write to silicon.com by posting a Reader Comment below, or emailing editorial@silicon.com.