Monica Harrington at TechFlash posts on "Innovation: Nine hurdles facing America as a center of tech" discussing our country's challenges in maintaining an education system, and therefore workforce, capable of maintaining the lead in global technical innovation.

This isn't really an article for CIOs so much as about them, but it is an interesting perspective and worth looking at for an angle on our industry you probably have been aware of, but possibly haven't considered important or interesting. I'm still undecided myself; it's not clear to me that we need to be the global center of technology, for many of the same reasons she outlines.

What may have struck me most among the points given, although it seems oddly misplaced and perhaps tangential to the overall argument, was number six:

6) We have always been a nation of immigrants – and the number #1 source of current US immigration, legal and non, is Mexico, which placed dead last (#30 out of 30 countries) in the test above for BOTH science and math understanding. Hopefully, the people reading this post can do the math for themselves regarding what that might mean in terms of America’s long term prospects as a leader in tech.

I'm not quite sure it follows that because most immigrants to the US are from Mexico, that those immigrants will inevitably comprise the pool for tech recruiting... it seems to me that pool of candidates has always been self-selected and exceeds the averages in education. Just because a country experiences a surge in poorly educated, low-income workers looking for agriculture jobs doesn't mean they are going to suddenly start dropping off resumes at Google, or somehow preventing more educated candidates from doing so. It's an odd statement, even in the context of the piece. But it did get me thinking.

Something technical people often pride themselves on is rationality. We like to think that we see reality as it is, and react according to how it is, not how we would like it to be. One of the reasons that Bill Gates has had such phenomenal success in charitable works is that he has applied this rationality to places where it was long lacking in the philanthropic community. Sometimes you have to do things to succeed which are counter-intuitive. Perhaps the reality here is that in some parts, technology and technical innovation have become commodities which no longer can pay for the investments in education and research required to produce them here in the US. Like manufacturing, it may be a market our labor force is pricing itself out of. Most techs I know seem to agree on a point that laborers more dependent on heavy industry have had trouble grasping until the cold results of economic reality have already closed their jaws: markets can't bear the pricing required to keep those jobs on American soil. Many of us here in Seattle have been shaking our heads lately at the Boeing debacle over the location of the second 787 production line. Union workers interviewed in the wake of its loss to South Carolina shake their fists and claim it's just a stop along the road to China or South America. And the tech geeks are just shaking their heads saying, "No kidding." Of course that's what's happening... it's just economics.

But we're less sanguine when it comes to our own jobs, claiming that it's un-American, or that we produce better products, or code more cleanly, than off-shore competitors. But those are the same claims the Boeing troops make, and it's hard to see until afterward that they are generally specious objections. We're just people, we're not somehow ordained, and others can learn to do what we do. Faster, as our education system erodes. The rational response isn't to deny this and shake our fists, but to figure out how to take advantage of the new order... innovate at a higher level.

Because it's an emotional subject, it's difficult to have a rational discussion, and I expect to be deleting a lot of comments on this post after it goes out. But I'm curious; what are CIOs taking away from this situation, and what is the appropriate long-term response to this state of affairs?