Move and think
An IT professional’s reflection on our collective descent into idiocracy
By ALEXANDER ZHIVETYEV
A short while ago, I came over to the university I had graduated from 5 years earlier to present my small IT-company in search of young and gifted talents. On our way to the lecture hall, me and my colleague met our former academic advisor, a teacher we’d always been on good terms with.
We got upset when she told us the following: there’s like two-three sensible students a stream, so companies are forced to hire them at the early years of their education, pay for their training and teach them for a year, all this at a loss and just to keep them from business rivals. She knew that for sure, since the company she herself worked for was in the same position. Students have become tranquil and polite, but crushingly dumb, not able to manage most easy tasks even at the fifth try. Rebels have gone, sheep are left.
While we were introducing our company, students were filling in forms offering to enumerate their skills in several technologies. Having analyzed the data, we were disappointed to find out that, with their level of knowledge, none of the students would be able to perform tasks our clients paid us for. They would need a couple of months’ practice before managers could charge them with those tasks. But even after this period of time, students would need to attend university on a constant basis, which would considerably challenge time-management and overload senior experts who teach the young. It’s highly possible that we would really need to pay for teaching and practice of students for about a year before we could fully integrate them into the routine and start getting at least some profit.
On our way back, we met another acquaintance of ours, member of the department, who told us that everything about the university has changed — the student admission level tripled, the education simplified significantly. You could now continue studies for a year with no credits, when back in our days, ignorance of analysis and linear algebra in freshman year threatened that you could be expelled; for boys this also threatened involuntary service.
In my student years, groupmates competed for job positions. Recruited were those who won academic competitions, succeeded in studying, wrote correct quality code better and faster than others, easily embraced algorithms and paradigms. There’s plenty of vacant positions today, still companies compete with each other for those who can do at least something. A sad tendency, not just at my university — all over the country.
Every second person in Russia has a diploma. We got people with higher education (6 years) who make fries in McDonalds. If there’s no such thing in your country yet, I’m afraid I’ll have to disappoint you — it’s coming soon. I suppose people in your countries also spend their time watching US series, making selfies for Instagram, and ravenously swallowing entertaining content staring into their iPhones. You shouldn’t wonder then why IT-services are so costly, including in your country.
A well-known bank faces the same challenge in this respect as our small company. It is forced to hire several people for the same position, dismissing all of them except one after probation period’s over. Banks offer decent ‘Moscow’ salary, which has to be paid to every contestant during the probation period. Considering taxes and other required expenses, it can be suggested that a new employee will really pay off no sooner than in a year, if by that time they don’t decide to change the job, of course. Job requirements: ‘higher or undergraduate education’, ‘skills to handle non-routine procedures’, ‘outcome driven’. I wonder, what ultimate cost a bank has to pay for one capable employee? A million rubles?
We were driven to the university by the feeling of despair. The job market is going through severe hardships; the cost of worthy personnel is increasing yearly. Nobody hands in accomplished test tasks — they seem to be too complex. One of our leading programmers is leaving us — he considers improving his English and moving to the West for a job.
The department at my university enrolls 220 students a year. One department at one university in a small city. In 2008 more than 7,5 million people studied at different universities all over the country. If there’s truly just two-three sensible students a stream — it makes one percent. Uni admissions are increasing, the number of universities and vacant positions is on the rise, elimination is decreasing. The very idea of higher education gets lost when anyone can obtain a diploma.
In just a couple of years we’re expecting a crisis that cannot be compared to all crises we’ve been through since the demise of the Soviet Union. Even more companies are going to be forced to shut down due to this ‘brain drain’ which leads to severe challenges in executive decision-making. Intelligence levels of all financial transactors — the government, business, and science — will decrease dramatically. Idiots will pollute the government, passing laws and initiating reforms; they will uphold critical decisions sitting on executive boards of major companies and corporations that define the level of well-being of entire countries.
This is not only influenced by the educational level — hundreds of other factors contribute as well, still what’s the quickest way to go dumb? Blind indulgence of desires. Minimum effort expense. Challenge avoidance. Total delight, growing comfort levels. Couch-lounging.
In the process of evolution, humans have been working to simplify life conditions. We have invented the wheel to move faster and transfer different goods, the alphabet — to easily transport and spread info, the remote control — to switch between channels from a distance. This process is going now and will continue tomorrow. It has seemingly evolved us every step of the way — from cave savages who utilized fire to fend off wild animals to geniuses able to fly to space and transfer energy wirelessly. But even this is nothing! Imagine what we will be capable of in like two hundred years at the current speed of scientific and technological advances.
On the other hand, simplification always causes side effects. We no longer have needs to fire arrows into animals or construct some tricky traps — in other words, to rack our brain in search of food. Our bodies have grown soft and lost the ability to defend; our nose, ear and reaction have degraded. We used to kill mammoths; today even lynx can easily overpower a naked man. Do you feel ready to strike back if a large wild cat attacks you in a flash trying to cut your carotid artery with its sharp fangs?
Our brain, though powerful in its knowledge resources accumulated through human history, is also degrading. Mike Judge’s forecasts seem to be coming true — our teenagers are turning into Beavises and Buttheads, and our future — into ‘Idiocracy’. Imagine the dumbest of your classmates, the slowest on all subjects, who hardly reached the passing grade, would become in a thousand years the brightest man on Earth. What kind of life would it be? What would people do? They would be pushing buttons while some mechanisms would keep them alive in a mysterious way they’d never perceive. They would stop moving and thinking because these activities are dying off, since you can now sink into virtual reality while nutrition and nutrients will be flowing into your body automatically and effortlessly.
But where’s the critical point at which simplification contributing to development reaches the ceiling and gets replaced by degeneration swallowing up the humanity? When are we going to become so dumb that we won’t be able not only to figure out the work of mechanisms invented by our ancestors, but simply how to operate them? Can this point be defined objectively? Social network invention — an ingenious breakthrough, or a deadly poison for the humanity? Henry Ford replaced a horse with a car but could he have imagined huge traffic jams and lungs of metropolitan citizens filled with lead and carcinogens?
When will the most precious possession we were granted — our mind — fall victim to our own advances? The death of another civilization on planet Earth. ‘Death from Wit’ — a new drama by Griboedov, though this time not of a personality, but of the whole modern humanity.
We’re not yet meant to comprehend this. To look at it ‘from the outside’ will take years. It will be the following generation, no the current one, that will take social network for granted since it will be there from birth, which also discourages from clear vision. We can barely recognize at which point we are now, if we’re moving forwards or backwards. Still we’re positive about what it takes to go the right direction.
Help the humanity to plot the right vector for development — move and think as often as possible. Go running and extend distances, lift heavy, pass healthy genes to your offsprings; take challenges, make discoveries. Become legends. Save our species.
