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UK's education system blamed for IT jobs going to non-Brits

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

I grew up abroad, and one of the first things I noticed in the UK was the ridiculous ratio of "managers" to workers. "managers" because most of them couldn't manage their way out of a paper bag soaked in a canal for a day. There's this weird cultural aversion to doing anything resembling real work, as if achieving something is somehow beneath you.

The other issue, as I see it, is that, in the UK , the term engineer is used to mean tradesman, which is emphatically not what an engineer is.

Where I grew up, an engineer designs things and has, at least, a bachelors degree (and that's entry level, they're all working towards masters degrees). If anything, the view is that engineers are entirely too theoretical and paper based. A technician makes those designs work in the real world and implements and maintains them. A tradesman is exactly what it says, a tradesman.

To give that a real world context, Engineers design the grid, Technicians implement the grid, and a tradesman wires your house. Or, Engineers design the firewall, Technicians implement the firewall, and the PFY plugs the computer into the LAN socket. Or Dev, DevOps, PC Maintenance.

The UK somehow blurs this to the point where an engineer or technician can be stuck wasting time plugging computers in and it's viewed as acceptable, instead of the utter waste of their time it actually is.

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