John Cridland, director general of the Confederation of British Industry came up with this breathtakingly idiotic line in an interview when talking about the British video games industry.
“We need extra coders – dozens and dozens of them – but nobody is going to play a game designed by a spotty nerd. We need people with artistic flair”.
Not only does it demonstrate Donald Trump level of ignorance and lack of self-awaremess, but his willingness to throw out casual slurs at an entire profession makes him the sort of person likely to use racial and gendered slurs if he thought he could get away with it.
How on Earth did a tool like this become director general of the CBI?
In the comments thread, commenter “Joe5000″ sums him up rather well.
In all seriousness, this contempt by the management classes towards technical workers is the main reason Britain’s economy struggles. We don’t have a Google or Microsoft like America, we don’t have a Volkswagen or Siemens like Germany, we don’t have a Toyota or Sony like Japan. But what we do have is a management class filled with people of little ability other than self-promotion with a contempt for the plebs who actually create the marketable products that drive a successful economy.
You ever wonder why Britain has such a bad trade balance and so much debt? It’s because the economy is run by people like John Cridland, a quangocrat and Oxbridge liberal arts grad who is given high positions and titles and a soapbox to run his mouth over things he knows nothing about.
I’ve always held that Britain has the worst management in the developed world and this guy is the ‘manager of managers’, enough said.
Quite.
What an idiot but Joe5000 does indeed sum up him and many others like him.
He reminds me a lot of your former colleague, Nigel Piercy.
Indeed. I mentioned that in the comments in the Grauniad
Oh dear. I think his point may have been: Computer Game Design needs people with artistic talents as well as coders – which is fair comment. But what a horrid way of putting it. I thought these business leaders were supposed to be better communicators than us nerds?
It’s not so much a failure of communication as a choice of words that betrays what he really thinks. He looks down his nose at the people who actually do the work of making things.
# In all seriousness, this contempt by the management classes towards technical
# workers is the main reason Britains economy struggles. We dont have a Google
# or Microsoft like America, we dont have a Volkswagen or Siemens like Germany,
# we dont have a Toyota or Sony like Japan.
In the case of contempt for technical people, this commenter is right. It’s one of the major things that keeps girls (and many boys too, but we ignore them) out of tech. When you’re young and fitting in and being cool is hugely important to you, you don’t want to be seen as a geek or a nerd, so you avoid certain topics. This is built into our culture at a deep level, it’s even in the fairy tales we tell kids. But we can’t even discuss it because the ‘it’s the patriarchy’ crowd don’t want to hear any conflicting ideas.
But I’m less convinced that our lack of manufacturing can be attributed to this. We used to have such an industry, but it came apart in the 70s/80s, and I don’t buy that we suddenly became contemptuous of it then (some have always been contemptous of it, but plenty of people at the time were hoping to land jobs in traditional manufacturing, and a lot of people were proud of working in that industry). Furthermore, contempt of technical people is embodied in the idea of the ‘geek’ or ‘nerd’: there’s a particular stereotype. This is not true of manufacturing-type people.
We do have a significant computer-games industry, thanks to the ZX spectrum boom of the 80s. Still, there has long been a prejudice against technical subjects/people. I think the expectations of many in the 70s/80s were that they/their children would go into traditional manufacturing roles , but those jobs were gone by the time those children grew up. People weren’t prejudiced against that, they expected “you’ll go down pit like father and grandfather before you” But the pits were closed.
” This is built into our culture at a deep level, it’s even in the fairy tales we tell kids.”
I am probably late to the party, but which fairy tales we tell kids that being tech savy is a bad thing?