Next week, Market Sentinel is taking on a work experience student (summer intern). He is Amnon Ferber from University College School in North London. We do this as often as we can. We find school leavers are best, because they haven’t learnt bad habits! We give them reading lists, encourage them to get involved in open source programming, teach them how software development works and how to marshall their thoughts. One of our work experience guys from a previous incarnation, Adam Langley, has ended up working for Google. We tend to end up employing our work experience students irregularly during their college years, giving them interesting problems to solve, pieces of programming, systems administration conundrums to solve. Our ambition is to give them work indefinitely.

I took my approach to talent spotting from working at Amazon. At Amazon I was staggered by the amount of time devoted to head-hunting the most talented programmers. Frequently very senior executives would spend 50% of their working day locating and interviewing talented people. It is an approach that pays dividends. Wealth creation in high technology business is all about finding brilliant people and persuading them to come work with you.

Given what I know about the prospects for this company and those like it I am frequently surprised by how few students are interested in programming. This is a finding confirmed by a UK report, which announces: “a 50% drop in applications for computer-related degrees, a 60% drop in software engineering students and a 47% drop in systems engineering students”.

Market Sentinel already uses a variety of software designers in Ukraine, New Zealand, the Philippines and Sri Lanka for our work. The lack of a UK skills base in programming will result in more and more of this kind of work going overseas, but much more seriously it will mean that there is less likelihood of the Market Sentinels of the future being developed here. This is a bad thing for the UK economy.