admin – Page 16 – Musings on Languages, IT and other stuff

Things I wish could be real in every company

I’m not sure how it happened but Google+ seems to be working for me in the way that I want a social network to work; in the way that I wanted twitter to work (but it doesn’t) and in a way that FaceBook has just never worked for me. In the main, it’s pushing higher quality content to me.

One of the things which caught my attention this morning was this from Sergey Brin. It’s not for the amazingness of a hangout between Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama although that in itself is a measure of how much the world of communications is changing.

The line which really got me was this:

Incredible. It was just a handful of months ago that +Vic Gundotra and I were at the office late one day talking about how to make communication on what was to become Google+ really dynamic. The discussion turned to the video conferencing technology that another team was building with a completely different product in mind.

“I bet you can just throw that into profiles with a couple of lines of javascript,” I said mostly sarcastically to goad him on. Sure enough about 15 minutes later we were participating in our first hangout thanks to some amazing engineering footwork and maybe a bit more than a couple of lines.

This is basically how video conferencing got into Google+. An off the cuff remark. It was in response to the dilemma of making Google+ more dynamic. I’m not sure what they were talking about there, but what interested me about this was the utter flexibility of the development model in Google that enabled them to do this; to take a piece of functionality that they were developing for one product and implementing it in another product without a convoluted mess of process to get permission to do this. In one way it is an example of that ultimate evil; project scope creep; in another, but more important way, it’s an example of recognising how to make a great product better without being hung up on bureaucratic process.

That takes vision.

Tools appropriate to the task

A couple of things cropped up today. Microsoft were looking for user feedback – I’m happy to give this for the most part so that was done.

Then there was *that* argument. I stopped reading Slashdot because of *that* argument and I think I’ve written about it before on previous sites. It relates to computer operating systems and the tribalism that goes with them.

I run iOS on my mobile devices. I run Windows on my personal computer, Windows is applied to me at work and as far as business systems are concerned, I have a lot of experience with an IBM mainframe.

*That* argument first raised its head in a discussion on mainframes. Put simply, a significant number of slashdot readers were of the opinion that mainframes were obsolete, and should be replaced by Linux server farms. I think that was the first time I came into contact with Linux fanboys to be honest and it was not a pleasant relationship. A key issue I had with the whole argument was that they were unfamiliar with what mainframes did, had to do, but assumed their shiny server farms could do it because they were expert in Linux and loads of servers and…

That’s not to say they couldn’t do what mainframes did. But because they didn’t know exactly what mainframes did, and what was required of said mainframes, they weren’t, in my opinion, qualified to comment one way or the other. *That* debate was interesting because you could see a key difference between basically two generations (I’m comparatively young and most mainframe experts are generally older than me). The older guys, the guys who knew large systems, took the view that there were many systems and many tasks and no system was appropriate for all tasks. That there were some things that mainframes did better, and some things that more modern server farms did better, and likewise on the desktop front. You could not argue that only one OS was able to do everything. It could but that didn’t mean it was any good at it.

Debates of this nature wear me out. Today it was desktop related. One key argument given in favour of anything other than Microsoft Windows is that it’s a) easier to configure and b) easier to use than Windows. In other words, Windows is the worst.

Again, and again, and again, it’s really not that simple. Windows is actually very easy to plug in and play. It’s when you want to do something outside the box that it can be not straightforward. But that lack of straightforwardness is often accepted as normal for Linux installs. And the software you might want to use may not have a Linux version. Photoshop is a key example.

It’s not that there aren’t functional equivalents, and in the Linux world, yes, there is the Gimp. But I’ve used it. And I have paid for Photoshop because it has been worth it to me.

Probably the easiest plug and plays are Macs. But if you’re a technogeek who likes messing around with the innards of an OS, it may not be the best choice for you. In fact, given the way Apple are going with their mobile devices it almost certainly won’t be in the long term.

Ultimately, the point I am making is that it is not true that Linux or Mac or Windows is the only answer to the question. Different OSs, different systems do different things better or worse. It’s almost like the laws of comparative advantage. So your main objective shouldn’t be to religiously devote yourself to one OS. I’m really not impressed if you say unto me that you do everything in Linux because in the grand scheme of things, that does not render you qualified to imply that everyone should do things your way or, indeed, that everyone needs to accomplish the same tasks as you. In other words, different tools fit different requirements and this is true even at the OS level.

Interestingly enough, as it happens, Microsoft, in their user survey today, were all about Google and not, for example, Linux or Mac. As noted by this particularly interesting xkcd:

The game is changing, basically.

ETA: This post was written before I heard that Steve Jobs had died.

So the presents have started arriving from Open University

Twice in the last couple of weeks, I have missed package deliveries and had to re-arrange forwarding. Both were from the Open University.

Today’s one which was the third, and apparently final mailing for my first maths module, arrived today. It had books for every chapter, and the one that caught my interest – more than anything – was Block D. Block D concentrates on Chance/Probability and it’s what I remember most from 2o years ago.

Chance and probably is quite topical in the UK at the moment because a senior judge has recommended that Bayes theorem not be applied in expert statistical evidence in court cases. This has caused a lot of debate amongst statisticians and mathematicians (including the “he’s probably not qualified to make a call on that in his own right” line of reasoning.

One of the things which saddens me most about the generally low levels of numeracy in Ireland is that people aren’t equipped to have these debates; they’re not equipped to assess the likelihood of things happening based on prior data (like oh, house price crashes). While I’ve signed up for a degree in mathematics and statistics, Open University also does a degree in maths and maths teaching. Given a wider debate about the quality, and the level of qualification, of maths teachers here in Ireland, this is quite interesting.

For me, most of what this year consists of is modelling. I’m interested in this too because I have tangential interests in wave modelling and to a lesser extent, climate modelling. What’s great about all this is that it’s going to provide me with tools to do other things I am interested in beyond the day to day business of work and life. There’s a tiny undisciplined part of me which would really and truly like to hit on Part D before I do anything else because I remember probability from school and liking it very much (and scoring full marks in the probability question in my leaving certificate); but I recognise that some discipline is going to help me most through this.

There is always a lot to be said for learning something new, however, so this makes me quite happy.

How communications changed your view of the world.

Way back in a past life when I was a regular member of a library (when I had fewer plates to spin), I picked up a book called Krakatoa The Day the World Exploded. In addition to all the disaster details about the numbers killed, how they died and how Krakatoa differed to a lot of other volcanic eruptions in the area, one of the things which struck me was how the changes in communication technology at the time caused that to have greater in depth reporting in Europe than pretty much any previous similar – for a given value of similar given that the Krakatoa disaster was historically noteworthy – on account of the telegraph.

You could see this earlier this year when Japan suffered its megaquake and tsunami – the news spread like wildfire around the world because it’s just so easy.

About an hour ago, north western Canada was hit by a 6.7 (currently this is what the USGS is giving for it). It’s not a particularly highly populated area and the epicentre appears to have been some distance from the closest major population centres. I picked up the news on twitter which is where I get most of my news and from there went straight to the USGS. Another of my friends gets a push notification on his phone for any earthquake measuring greater than 5.0.

I’m not a geologist. I’m just curious about a lot of things sometimes and one of the things that catch my interest a bit more than normal is how the earth behaves, in particular, when things go wrong. Hence, I borrow books about Krakatoa blowing apart. And I read articles and watch science specials. I know, for example, that there’s a supervolcano under Yellowstone National Park and that it blows at relatively regular intervals and is now running late. I found that fascinating. My flatmate was terrified. But I can’t change how that volcano behaves. I just want to know more about it.

I’m also fascinated in how information from the past is painstakingly collected and collated to tell a story. The earthquake in British Columbia is part of a story I find fascinating and it relates to the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Put simply, every so often, there is a major, major earthquake there. Because that area isn’t so populated, the record of those earthquakes is drawn from the earth. It’s also drawn from Japan because experts in tsunami history have been able to match up a mystery tsunami with an unrecorded earthquake in North America, unremarked there because of the very low population density there. That element of detective work fascinates me.

When the earthquake struck Canada this evening, it automatically flagged for me because I know about the Cascadia Subduction Zone and the fact that historically it has generated some serious activities and some significant tsunamis. It’s based on the fact that I’m an information magpie sometimes. My friend who gets the earthquake alerts on his phone wasn’t familiar with this. I can’t remember whether it came to me via some documentary on a cable channel (possibly) although i was reminded of it in a piece I read on the site of a west coast America newspaper the other day, the main thrust of which was to highlight just how unprepared that area is for a major earthquake.

I’m not sure I’d know quite so much about these things if it weren’t for those sources of information like the library when I was younger and now, books on demand courtesy of amazon.com and the kindle software. Yes, I still occasionally watch these things on television because television has an interesting way of presenting information sometimes even if it can be a lot more superficial than the details you get in well written (and illustrated) books. And websites now.

I love that I can go to this amazing vat of knowledge and get what I want. When I ring my mother to tell her about things like this, she reaches for the radio because when she was my age, radio news was internet. For me now I reach for the USGS page and find out all I need to know (like where this thing was on map relative to the CSZ so as to confirm my suspicions).

So I’m back at college again.

I have spent a lot of the last three years trying to figure out what was the best way of getting myself back into a maths trip. I had looked at a possible part time degree in the Dublin Institute of Technology but the online documentation didn’t really attract me, so I waited another bit, searched another lot, and this year, I decided to sign up to start a degree in mathematics and statistics with the Open University.

I did my school leaving examination in Ireland in 1990 which is a frighteningly long time ago. I have been making noise about this for years but have delayed it for various practical reasons linked to normal life. This year, those considerations have not gone away and it doesn’t look like they were likely to in the short term so I decided that I wasn’t going to wait for things I can’t control to sort themselves out so that I could go off and do this. I expect to have forgotten a lot of this; and the revision notes are here beside me. I haven’t worked out how I am going to arrange all this from a practical point of view – I am surrounded by paper as it is.

I toyed with putting up a separate blog about this and how I was getting on, but in the end figured that the best thing to do was to put it onto this blog. So this is by way of a warning to note there will be bits of maths cropping up here.

Easy to use or not.

Rather unexpectedly yesterday I found myself in an online debate on Linux versus Windows. This doesn’t usually happen to me for a couple of reasons:

I obey the law of avoiding 386 situations. Arguments which are futile are avoided. Linux versus Windows is futile. There are more fun ways to spend my time;
I am a mainframe programmer and past discussions on slashdot.org (wonder if that still even really exists) have taught me that a) mainframe programmers understand different tools are appropriate for different purposes and b) Linux enthusiasts tend to have the fervour of the average recent religious convert (more zealous than the founders themselves and c) too many elements of the argument are subjective anyway.

The argument/debate/online fistycuffs centred on which was easier to use, Linux or Windows. At this stage I have to declare the following interest: I use Windows machines both at work and at home when I’m not TE into a mainframe environment. It’s not that I have anything against open source – philosophically the idea fascinates me – but that various things for which I require a functional computer also require that I run Windows. I have never owned a Mac, although I’ve used them from time to time. So I can’t actually make a call on whether it’s easier to use Windows or Linux. However, pretty much everything I have read suggests that if you’re not a technically minded person, Linux is currently nowhere near out of the box enough.

You could argue that Windows isn’t either, but typically, I don’t have to do much or anything to the box when I buy it, I don’t have to set up anything other than a wireless connection and then it, over a bit of time, sets itself up to a greater or lesser extent. There’s no messing around with drivers, there’s no messing around trying to get different pieces of software to run, you don’t usually have to actually install the operating system, regardless of how easy it may be to someone to install Linux to an empty box.

The reason I got involved was that someone came up with the idea that computers were complicated machines and if they were complicated, then they shouldn’t be easy to use.

I can’t understand this rationale in anything other than the terms of a guild protecting its own interest and mysteries. Lots of things are complicated, but they are easy to use. My example was cars – you no longer have to manually turn the engine, and things rarely go wrong with them (at least in my experience). Compared to how things were in the 1900s when people were practically building their own cars, cars are easy out to function. Likewise refrigerators. There’s a fridge-freezer just five metres away and I don’t have to do anything. I have no idea how it converts warm external air to colder air to keep my cheese from going mouldy and tomorrow’s breakfast at an optimum temperature for summer.

Philosophically, I can’t understand the idea that because, underneath the hood of something is complicated, the end product has to be difficult to use.

I have no doubt that if someone provides you with a Linux box that is all nicely installed and has email and a browser running okay on it, and maybe Open Office, the likelihood is that you’ll be grand, in the way that it’s more or less grand when you go and collect a Windows machine from your nearest retailer. But given that this option is difficult to come by for two reasons a) the OEMs would have to choose a distro and this choice would probably be castigated by some within the community and b) Windows machines are ubiquitous and they typically work out of the box for most people then for most people, getting a Linux box running is just not as obvious or straightforward as getting their Windows box up and running.

A lot of technically minded people have no idea what it’s like not to be technically minded. They miss that people just want to be able to email their kids in America and their boyfriends in Sweden or whatever, they want to be able to read FaceBook and order books from Amazon. I can’t see how this needs to be complicated.

In the grand scheme of debates over Linux versus Windows versus the Volcano, the idea that computers should be difficult to use is one I just can’t buy.

I’m googleplussed

Google released another product the other day, invite only. Limited invite only. More limited, for example, than Google Wave appeared to be and that didn’t quite go according to plan. This is called Google+ and if you read the media, the general deal is that this is Google’s make or break on the social media front. Because Buzz didn’t quite go according to plan either. Or Wave.

So if you were minded to say so, there’s quite a lot riding on Google+ because this has to be their FaceBook killer. I’m not sure it’s that simple – the world is big enough for a few social media platforms; what it is not big enough is for just one. I should probably nail my colours to the mast – I am no great fan of FaceBook.

There are a variety of reasons for this involving privacy, photography rights, the amount of tuning you have to do to get permissions to your choice, deleting your account isn’t easy and I’m not sure whether FaceBook thinks they own any data about me or whether I do. As a result, my activity on FaceBook is sporadic at best and I’d prefer an alternative that I can configure more easily, and that isn’t, when it boils down to it, FaceBook.

I may not feel this way when I have 250 friends on Google+.

Anyway, so far, I have to say I like Google+. The user interface is a lot nicer and less cluttered. To a great extent, font sizes are friendlier to look at, and because there are currently no ads and no irritating Zynga games and related ads for Zynga games, it’s altogether a lot more – dare I say it – grown up place to be. I find it easier to talk to people on it. I haven’t used Picasa for years but would be tempted to start using it now to interact with Google+. And because it’s Google and they’ve been involved in image hosting/sharing for years, I rather hope their ToS would involve some consideration for who owns the copyright on your photograph.

In terms of organising people you know on Google+, their Circles idea is nice and sweet. And very easy to use. I’m scratching my head trying to work out just why it is FaceBook is such a hassle to administer and I think it comes down to the user interface again. Google’s suits me. FaceBook’s doesn’t. I never did figure out how to arrange things so that my aging relatives didn’t get all the murky details of any given parties but it’s self evident with Google+. The block button is remarkably easy to find too.

The other thing I like about Google+ – so far – is Sparks. I’m not sure I would have called it that but it reminds me a little of Zite and Flipboard on the iPad. It basically feeds you news that matches up with your interests. Which you can define (in my case, kitesurfing, programming, crochet and a few more I haven’t added yet) and yes, there are interesting things there. This could have a massive impact on news delivery in the future.

All in all, on current acquaintance, I like Google+ more than FaceBook (but I have to admit that would not be so hard). From a feature set point of view, I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t be reasonably successful – the simple fact is FaceBook has some critical mass which it won’t lose overnight (I mean, MySpace is still there, despite it all). What worries me is that there is some idea out there that one of them has to win. I’m not sure it has to. I think that Google+ may attract a bunch of people for whom FaceBook is becoming a no-go area because it may be too social, too full of rubbish, not cool any more, or just completely unworkable. Because it has a reasonably decent user community already on Gmail, once they get rid of the limits on invites, it should have a decent readymade community.

I’m interested to see what their advertising plan for it is. One of the key reasons it’s so clean at the moment is that it doesn’t have any advertising. One of FB’s big cry outs earlier this year involved FaceBook email – Google already has this with Gmail and has for years so FaceBook is definitely in catch up mode there. Unlike the screaming for invites that Google+ seems to have engendered, I don’t see the same fascination with FaceBook email.

The issue with FaceBook is…for all that…there is a community of people just waiting for FaceBook to keel over and die. This means there are a lot of comments about how Google+ is Google’s last gap at social media, the only chance to face up to the behemoth which is FaceBook. I’m not sure it’s that simple because to be honest, one of the vibes I get about Google+ is that it may be more usable for collaboration purposes, in terms of setting up specific circles, for example. For the time being, I’m more interested in seeing how I can get Google+ to work better for me as I get more familiar with it, and, as more people get into the secret garden.

listening…

I recently downloaded the latest Steven Levy book, “In the Plex” which is pretty much a history of Google. It’s now on my nice friendly iPad where Kindle software delivers me a lot of interesting things.

I use Google products on a daily basis. Their search is generally reliable apart from a blip last year when it was useless for a while. With personalisation/instant search it seems to be improving again. I use gmail because – by and large – it works and now it’s accessible on all my devices with relatively little hassle. But I didn’t know too much about the company other than it was founded by a couple of kids some time ago. Those kids are around my age now which is a bit odd when you think of it.

Anyway, one of the things that struck me about Google is just how creative they are on certain fronts. They need to save money? They ask their staff for ideas on how to do it. I’ve worked in quite a few companies. I have to say that for the lossmaking ones, I don’t think they ever entertained the idea that asking their staff for advice on where to cut waste was a good idea. Many old school companies just go for the wages and staff every time.

The other thing which they do that I think is highly interesting is their 20% idea. If you’re not familiar with this (and if you don’t work in tech, you probably wouldn’t be), the general gist is that Google employees can turn 20% of their work time over to a personal project that interests them – a lot of google products grew out of this. I think 3M may have done something not too different from whence we got post-it notes.

One of the things which I have noticed that stifles innovation in a lot of companies – not internet search companies – is that ideas are often top down. Another thing is obviously when an idea comes from bottom up is that there is a cat fight over who gets credit for it. This isn’t really in the interest of the company when you think about it. If you brought about a situation whereby anyone who had an idea could fight for it and also be given appropriate credit for it, you might find a lot more interesting innovation coming from your staff. With it, that will bring a lot more employee involvement beyond merely the salary. Just the feeling of having made an unexpected difference.

Google hasn’t a massively hierarchical management structure for a company of its size which may make it easier to implement slightly left of centre ideas like this. But I don’t see any real reason why it couldn’t work in a hierarchically managed company either. A key component of why Google is where it is now is that it was a company that fostered ideas. A lot of mainstream companies – regardless of size – don’t do this any more. They are not looking at ideas really; they are looking at money and how to get it.

Yet every company everywhere started with an idea. I think ultimately that those ideas are currency, and because of the culture in many companies – where communication is very often a one way route – ideas get lost, or delayed.

It’s something to think about. I have another blog on this site which I use as an ideas whiteboard. There isn’t a whole lot there now but it’s a creative space where I think it would be useful to be able to look at things and reason out how they could work.

LinkedIn penetration – What’s it worth really?

Last week, ComScore issued a press release highlighting the penetration rates for Twitter and LinkedIn in a number of different companies. The Netherlands came out top. What was interesting – and hence rather more widely reported than you’d expect normally – was that Ireland came second in the table for LinkedIn. I was a little surprised. The press release is here. It concentrates mainly on the Netherlands use of social networking media but there is that table of penetration for LinkedIn and that’s what I want to talk about.

It caught my interest because at the same time, an online forum which I frequent was running a discussion on how to find jobs in IT in Ireland. Networking via LinkedIn featured as a key component of something people should be doing; and how they should manage their profile, for example. It interested me because it strikes me that LinkedIn is working more or less as a lot of people feel FaceBook should be – a connection building exercise. I’m not sure FaceBook really works that way.

Given that Ireland is behind a lot of other countries in terms of penetration of FaceBook and Twitter, I’m intrigued to know why we score highly on LinkedIn. It’s possible that this penetration is as a result of:

high number of IT professionals;
high number of professionals intermingling with the US market;
high levels of staff turnover in the IT sector.

LinkedIn is a little interesting on the financial front too as it is due to IPO sometime this year. The expected flotation figure is – comparatively speaking (according to Mashable by the way), not all that high. This is important because the figures being bandied about for FaceBook are rather stratospheric, despite a complete absence of useful financial information. LinkedIn’s IPO documentation offers a lot more clarity.

The recruitment process in Ireland has changed a lot over the last 10 years. I was direct-hired to my current company having done battle with the recruitment agencies which, from what I can see, are really not all that trusted. LinkedIn cites job vacancies as one of their main income streams and anecdotally, I know people who have been headhunted via LinkedIn. I wonder if a key contribution to LinkedIn’s position in Ireland relates to recruitment specifically and I’d be interested in finding a way of figuring it out.

LinkedIn is an interesting way of finding a job; however. If you have any colleagues (or direct line reporting) within your network, it may be difficult to hide the fact that you are interested in moving which may or may not be a good thing depending on a number of matters such as workplace atmosphere and hierarchy, remuneration issues and workplace culture.

One of the things that struck me most about LinkedIn at the time I registered by the way was how structured it was in terms of describing your background, experience. A key complaint I have about the online form application modusfindanewjobus is that it is can be very difficult to fit that around your actual life and experience. I particularly found this with an IBM form lately.

While that makes it easier for HR staff, it may not – and almost certainly isn’t – necessarily in the interest of either an employer or a potential candidate. For that reason – I think there will always be an interest in a well designed and informative CV. LinkedIn allow you to upload these which is helpful.

Declaration of interest – my linkedin profile is here.

Role of education in Ireland

I wound up in a twitter discussion with Marc Coleman today because he is running for election to the Seanad and he got into some sort of a tiff with Brian Lucey, an academic in Trinity, this week. As I follow both of them, the argument caught my attention and I ended up contributing. I believe the roots of the debate were in an article which Marc wrote for the Sunday Independent, link here, and which left me somewhat cold as far as writing style was concerned.

With respect to the debate on twitter, however, it reminded me that a key issue in Ireland is that the debate on education seems to be very fragmented. No one ever seems to clearly answer the question “What do we want of our education system?” Ultimately, our commentators and politicians spend time arguing on micro issues without first of all even assessing the purpose of our education system. As such, we wind up with letter writing campaigns to the newspapers about such esoteric matters as:

the place of Irish in the curriculum
teachers’ holidays being too long
the dumbing down of the maths syllabus
how few people are doing higher level course which would lead them on to research and development
how badly we do at languages (and how we should kill off Irish language teaching to deal with this)
classroom buildings/facilities
class sizes.

Marc Coleman appears to be unhappy at how we measure academic productivity. He latched onto academic lecture contact hours and used personal anecdote as a stick to beat Irish academics with. I’m not going to argue against the simple fact that compared to other countries, many of our academics are relatively well paid; only that if you want to bring about a way of measuring their worth to us, a little more detail is called for.

I don’t work in academia. I came close, about 10 years ago, to applying for a lectureship but the position in question was part time and held not enough promise in terms of research options. Marc Coleman wants us to only hire the good people, but has not yet answered me the simple question of How do we identify them. Nor can he tell me how we develop them. You don’t really buy good academic off academic trees; they need to be nurtured and their research funded.

I’m not happy with certain aspects of education in Ireland. I think our primary and secondary school cycles could do with being modernised. Having spoken to a number of teachers, I’m aware that where we have failing schools, we have ploughed lots of money and have failed to get parental engagement. I’m not enough of an expert on the social sciences front to figure out how we address that. I did volunteer to give grinds to kids in a disadvantaged comprehensive when I was a student myself – I’m not sure if the program is still running – but this anecdote is nowhere near adequate to make me an expert in dealing with some of the problems our education system faces at the coalface.

I’m not in the mood for picking over the carcass of whether researcher/lecturer A should be earning more or less than random person B doing a similar job somewhere because it’s a meaningless debate if you don’t actually first of all decide what you want the education system to achieve. For example, I’m not sure it is to our benefit collectively that it brought about a situation whereby the points race causes most of our brightest to direct themselves towards law, for example. Or that perceived economic benefit dictates trends in demand for third level courses. This does not exploit our collective ability to the best.

If I were a Seanad election candidate, I wouldn’t be focussing initially on what we pay our academics in terms of whether they represent value for money. I would be asking people what they want from education. It’s a very, very important question that would enable us to better identify value for money from the system. What is the required outcome? Arguing over contact hours is not going to answer that question.

While we currently do not charge tuition fees for undergraduate students, it’s worth noting that the UK is moving to a fee based system (and the implementation of that in England is causing ructions with respect to access being dictated by access to money), and the US has had a fee based system for years. The merit of that system is being questioned, given the debts that are imposed on young people going to college and the disconnect between those debts and the likelihood that their jobs will ever enable them to pay of those fees. Put simply, if you cause every job to require a college degree but then do not produce salaries that will enable people to pay off the cost of getting said degrees, you have a problem.

Because we have had a policy of trying to enable as many people to get into third level colleges as possible, we have diluted the value of basic university degrees such that postgraduate qualifications are near mandatory if you want to get a job. I’m not sure that this is to the benefit of the wider economy, particularly in a country which currently has abotu 15% unemployment.

I’d prefer it if our Seanad candidates considered wider questions like this rather than running into the cost of bits of the whole system.