Bill Gates finds it hard to locate good tech people

Microsoft just kick started their sixth annual Research Summit and the prime focus seems to be how to get kids interested back in technology. In fact, Bill Gates openly admitted that Microsoft as a software company is feeling the heat from the competition because they just cannot find good people to hire coming out from today’s universities.

Bill said that the kids coming out of the colleges often end up with incomplete skill sets, which make them a hard choice to hire. The summit is expected to attract around 400 academic researchers to the Redmond campus to discuss the next 10 years of computing. The first day saw Bill and Maria Klawe, dean of engineering at Princeton University emphasizing on how to encourage more students to enroll in computer-science programs.

This industry requires smart people to come out of universities capable of handling the ever-evolving technical fields so as to work on developing technologies of the future. Maria Klawe had a saddening figure for the attendees: The popularity of computer science as a major has fallen more than 60 percent between 2000 and 2004. This is in spite of the fact that software engineering and other techie jobs are due to grow the most in the coming years.

Both of them also said that the federal funding for academic research and graduate education is also declined resulting in bigger problems for the colleges.