Technical education at the speed of tech

In another sure sign of the zombie apocalypse, I just learned that certain startups here in San Francisco are hiring developer interns — interns — at salaries that amount to around $70,000 per year because, according to my source, “that’s the market price.” And for crack lead developers, many of whom happen to be in their early 20s? Closer to $200 grand a year.

You might wonder, at those prices, exactly what qualification are employers looking for. As InfoWorld’s Andrew Oliver noted in his classic, “Is a computer science degree worth the paper it’s printed on?,” a BSCS wouldn’t be one of them. Instead, the hiring process focuses on vetting the projects applicants have worked on.

[ Also on InfoWorld: Is a computer science degree worth the paper it’s printed on? | IT certifications no longer sure path to premium pay | Get sage advice on IT careers and management from Bob Lewis in InfoWorld’s Advice Line blog and newsletter. ]

You say you coded your first Web app when you were 14? That counts. Maybe an iOS app a couple years later? Let’s see the code. If you’re good, the more you’ve done, the more a developer manager can review, and the better the chance you have of landing a high-paying gig. It sounds a little like the guilds and apprenticeships of yore, except the skills change too fast to be handed down.

The devaluation of conventional academic credentials tracks with the recent slide in the premium pay for certifications, cited in Bill Snyder’s coverage of a Foote Partners survey of 2,400 employers. It’s a real problem: Those who offer certs or university degrees are having a hell of a timing keeping up with what the market wants, from Node.js ninjas to Java developers who know how to code MapReduce jobs.

What can fill the educational gap? Last week TechCrunch gave its Best New Startup of 2012 award to Coursera, an online learning nonprofit that offers a whole range of courses, including dozens taught by marquee universities in tech disciplines. Udacity offers a similar array of free college-level courses.

But such sites represent only the start of a new wave of online education, much of it video-based. A portion is already provided by tech companies and open source communities. Have a look, for example, at Google Developers Live, which offers dozens of video presentations per month on topics ranging from Android and App Engine development to the full range of Google APIs. And 10gen Education stands out as a great resource for developers who want to make the most of MongoDB.

I’m sure many of you reading this can point to other excellent free resources, no doubt scattered across YouTube. But for all this to reach critical mass, a number of big software companies will need to change their thinking, because training classes tend to represent a significant source of revenue. That shift must happen if to meet the outrageous demand for developers — or who knows what we’ll be paying 21-year-olds next year.

Unless we’re in another bubble — but I seriously doubt that. The rapid growth in technology today has more profound implications than, say, the dot-com boom or the social networking frenzy. Both of those trends were clearly visible and got everyone excited, but not a whole lot of important new technology was behind them.

Now entirely new vistas are opening up, and I don’t just mean big data and NoSQL databases, though they’re a good place to start. Mobile keeps exploding; even Windows RT represents a new opportunity, and (as Andrew Oliver noted in his post defending Java security) Android will soon matriculate everywhere as the new client-side Java. TVs are also becoming app dev platforms, and the OpenRemote project is helping to put home automation in reach after years of false promise. And probably more than any other single trend, the software-defined data center — although still at the starting line — proves that software is in fact eating the world.

Even as the overall U.S. unemployment rate ticked up to 7.9 percent last week, the tech industry has enjoyed the equivalent of full employment since the middle of last year. Barring unforeseen disasters, I don’t see that changing anytime soon. There are more job opportunities in tech than ever, particularly in software development — but the skills demanded seem to change from month to month and the need for continuous learning continues to rise. Whether provided by dot-orgs, vendors, communities, or traditional academic institutions, education desperately needs to find a way to keep up.

This article, “Technical education at the speed of tech,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Eric Knorr’s Modernizing IT blog. And for the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld on Twitter.