Seeking Coders, Tech Titans Turn To K-12 Schools 105
theodp writes: Politico reports on how a tech PR blitz on the importance of coding in K-12 schools has won over President Obama, who's now been dubbed the "coder-in-chief" after sitting down Monday to "write" a few lines of computer code with middle school students as part of a PR campaign for the Hour of Code, which has earned bipartisan support in Washington. From the article: "The $30 million campaign to promote computer science education has been financed by the tech industry, led by Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, with corporate contributions from Microsoft, Google, Amazon and other giants. It's been a smash success: So many students opened up a free coding tutorial on Monday that the host website crashed. But the campaign has also stirred unease from some educators concerned about the growing influence of corporations in public schools. And it's raised questions about the motives of tech companies, which are sounding an alarm about the lack of computer training in American schools even as they lobby Congress for more H-1B visas to bring in foreign programmers."
Motives (Score:5, Insightful)
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As a tech person, I like being well paid. As a manager, I'd like to be able to find someone in less than 6 months who has those skills.
I would definitely like it to be someone who is an American citizen and pay them well. After all, managers will generally make more than everyone but the most senior level specialists because we know what our people make, and we expect more. The rising tide lifts all boats, at least here in technical management land. As long as I can justify a high salary for a coder/adm
Businesses caused the problem by being too picky (Score:1)
It certainly could turn into a cheap labor scenario, and I am no fan of the H1-B, having worked with many in my time, but businesses that do not have a good pool of candidates are in big trouble, because you need talent as well as skill on your coding bench to make money and get ahead unless you're already a giant, and even then it hurts when your coders suck. Many H1-Bs are sweatshop hacks. However, there are some who are very talented and I am happy when they manage to upgrade to green card or even naturalize.
That's what you get when you do nothing to counter the entitlement mentality of businesses.
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They're out there. They're just working for other companies. If you can't find someone in 6 months, you're doing something wrong. Either you're not looking hard enough, or you want the purple squirrel instead of someone you can train to fill in gaps in their skill set, or the compensation package you're offering isn't enough to lure the good workers away from their current positions, or prospective candidates ask
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Wow... I guess we shouldn't educate our children then, that way our skills will be forever valuable, because no one else will ever be able to do them.
This is such an insightful comment, I just can't believe I didn't think of this huge breakthrough in cultural politics before.
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I think in the future to be a well rounded person, coding will be part of that. I can forsee any ocupation as well as everday living benefiting from some programming skills.
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Great. With the state of security on the Internet we need a wider pool of developers to sift the wheat from the chaff. Too many guys getting paid to do what they can't. With the current security awareness going on, and retailers starting to get sued by banks there may finally be hope for a bit of improvement.
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FTFY.
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Besides that, the difference between coders and non-coders in any profession is remarkably apparent; people who have learned coding at some point in their life seem to be the better troubleshooters and analysts. There are other ways to acquire tho
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Why aren't there more programmers? Because anyone smart enough to achieve a CS degree could instead get an MBA then a job with half the work and twice the pay.
A similar problem happened with Petroleum Engineers but with different results. They increased the pay and a couple years later there were plenty of qualified engineers.
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... as a source of cheap labor.
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The motive of tech companies is to fill the pipeline with cheap labor.
Stop being such a cynic. Their only motive is to educate the children, to provide them with a better tomorrow.
Programming is headed nowhere, the future is analog.
Hmm, lets see here (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead of teaching people a specific programming language then, why not teach them everything else that they should be learning in school anyway which makes a good programmer. Want a list? Okay smartass here is a list.
1. Language - More is better so that people can freely share and exchange ideas but at least English Grammar and Composition in the US.
2. Rhetoric and Logic - Logic teaches critical thinking skills as well as morality, and rhetoric further improves communication skills and rational discourse and debate (both of these things are painfully absent from academia today)
3. Math - Again more is better. Algebra and variables are the basis for simple programming language skills. This teaches the use of variables without locking someone into a restricted interface for coding in a specific language.
4. Supplement this curriculum with history economics which extends language and provides ample material for debate and discourse.
5. Further supplement the curriculum with Music theory to better learn Trig, and sciences to further their abilities with math and critical thinking.
Wow, sounds just about like classes we had in the US until the 1930s when we adopted the Prussian designed "Industrial Education system" which made people smart enough to calculate artillery range but too damn stupid to question orders doesn't it? Oh, you may not know this part of history since it's buried in piles of bureaucratic shit to hide it.. but it's there!
So why are we teaching very special bits of information and ignoring a classical education system which produced every single well known scientist in history? Still does really, because the best and brightest today go to private schools which do use the classical methods and not what public schools have become. Cui Bono. Well, large businesses that currently control everything benefit because people will be smart enough to follow instructions to make some piece of code work, but not smart enough to question why they make the code or question their economic status for doing so. Government institutions will do the same thing for the same reasons.
If what you said is true, "it's only for the children" I'll say prove it! Not one piece of public education today has been institutionalized "for the children" so why would you claim this piece is different? I believe it's just another appeal to emotion fantasy and has no connection with reality. I have history on my side, you have nothing but a delusion.
van Der Snoot Private Academy much? (Score:1)
Wow, sounds just about like classes we had in the US until the 1930s when we adopted the Prussian designed "Industrial Education system" which made people smart enough to calculate artillery range but too damn stupid to question orders doesn't it? Oh, you may not know this part of history since it's buried in piles of bureaucratic shit to hide it.. but it's there!
Your epic contempt for public schools, however good they can get, is shining brightly. Then again, I doubt you've seen a well-run, highly-ranked public school.
On the other hand, no real problem exists with the people we have.
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I have some citations on this below, you can search the thread for those citations in the other post. There are institutional problems with our public schools, so defending teachers that are intentionally handcuffed by the institution is a poor approach at addressing the concerns of numerous people criticizing the current bureaucracy (which is the failure).
Unfortunately I have seen the gems of public school systems. My criticism comes as a parent, not a person with no exposure or experience.
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The motive of tech companies is to fill the pipeline with cheap labor.
Stop being such a cynic. Their only motive is to educate the children, to provide them with a better tomorrow.
I believe the children are our future, we should teach them well and let them lead the way by showing them all the beauty they possess inside.
host website crashed (Score:2)
They might as well get introduced right to today's coding.
The first few comments are awfully pessimistic (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, it may sound like a cliche, but the world is becoming more and more reliant on computer technology. You shouldn't look at this as Microsoft looking to churn out cheap help to build Word 2025. That's just not what they're doing. Microsoft engineers aren't poorly compensated for their efforts. Their among the most highly-compensated coders out there.
These are folks who have seen computers completely transform the world around them, and they foresee this trend continuing (probably wisely). There will always be gluts here and there, or shortages here and there, but the fact is that if you want an army of super-intelligent robots cleaning our oceans, helping feed the planet, and maintaining our future space stations, then you're going to need many many more capable coders than we have now.
Re:The first few comments are awfully pessimistic (Score:4, Insightful)
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well, of course, more labor decreases wages.
That's not the worst that can happen... When wages goes down, there will be a lot more projects that will suddenly be feasible to implement.
:)
Sure it's possible to float the market... but it's not likely that we'll get enough people interested in CS anytime soon
CS is still a very boring field, and you can't sell it as anything else...
Re:The first few comments are awfully pessimistic (Score:5, Insightful)
When wages goes down, there will be a lot more projects that will suddenly be feasible to implement.
I guess that's why the low wages led to zero unemployment.
Oh, wait...
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The developed world guarantees a certain standard of living for everyone. That means anyone who wants to pay extremely low wages is relying on the government to keep their employees alive, fed and sheltered from the elements, and must expect to pay tax to contribute towards that.
Of course, the amount of tax paid is only a fraction of what it costs to keep the employees alive and productive, but the non-viable welfare queen businesses that rely on government hand-outs to survive will moan about them anyway.
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The developed world guarantees a certain standard of living for everyone.
Only as long as it can afford to do so. Then the guarantee goes away.
That means anyone who wants to pay extremely low wages is relying on the government to keep their employees alive, fed and sheltered from the elements, and must expect to pay tax to contribute towards that.
Let us keep in mind that most such businesses already pay taxes as do most of their customers. If that isn't enough, maybe you should look at cutting back on those guarantees (particularly, the ones like Social Security and health care related stuff, that don't actually contribute in an efficient way to a standard of living).
Of course, the amount of tax paid is only a fraction of what it costs to keep the employees alive and productive
That's what wages are for.
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Companies like Wal-Mart pay very, very little in taxes due to their thin price margins.
Another way to put that is that they have low profit margins and hence, are very sensitive to higher labor costs.
It is a known part of their business plan to keep their price of labor and goods down (by utilizing government welfare and cheap overseas labor) to keep prices low (and shareholder value high).
I wouldn't call that "shareholder value" since lower prices mean lower profits and thus, less shareholder value.
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You might as well accept the fact that you'll never be a billionaire. Stop pretending like you will be one day, and stop licking their boots. Look out for your own interests, for a change. Authoritarianism is deadly.
I appreciate that you are trying to understand my point of view. But the process of creating inefficient and ill-advised "guarantees" and public goods, and then punishing unpopular parties like businesses for allegedly taking advantage of those (basically scapegoating some mostly innocent groups because the scheme doesn't work as advertised), doesn't further my interests even though I will never be a billionaire.
Also, I disagree on what is authoritarianism. Sure, Walmart has a centralized control structu
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That's not the worst that can happen... When wages goes down, there will be a lot more projects that will suddenly be feasible to implement.
When wages go down, there will be a lot more crap projects that should never see the light of day that will suddenly be feasible to implement.
FTFY
Not to mention that the barriers to entry are already too low in many respects (just 'cuz you can cut-n-paste code doesn't make you a developer) and each "gold rush" phase is shorter than the previous one (look at how fast mobile development got unprofitable for 99.5% of all developers).
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I wouldn't call the Great Pyramids "crap". It's amazing what you can do with an unlimited supply of disposable slave labour.
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Bad example - modern evidence suggests that the Great Pyramids were built by salaried employees, possibly as a public works program to make up for the seasonal "unemployment" that would have occurred in sync with the Nile's flooding.
The Western notion that the Egyptians had vast hordes of slaves building the pyramids comes from incorrect speculation by the Ancient Greek historians, who didn't know what they were talking about - not really their fault, since the age of pyramids ended 1500 years before the Gr
Re:The first few comments are awfully pessimistic (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't let the name of a company blind you. I've been a Microsoft developer. They have multiple teams doing almost exactly the same, but just with slight changes. Those teams should be merged and the products would be greatly improved. The company is full of waste. Up until recently the employee evaluation system was extremely hostile. If you didn't stab someone in the back, you'd be the one with the knife in your back. Unless your team was lucky enough to hire a bad programmer. Then you could just churn through the newbies and the rest of your team was safe. It will be awhile until that culture dies out.
These folks are blinded by the tech around them. They don't see anything but tech. They assume the whole world uses and runs on tech. It doesn't. While it's true that there's way more programs, apps, websites, and solutions out there now, most of them are duplicates. There are tons of programs and libraries doing the same things.
And we don't need many, many more programmers. We need higher quality programmers. There's way too much crap. Had software been designed and written correctly, the entire software security industry would disappear. It exists entirely due to crappy or uninformed programmers and deadline pushing higher-ups.
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You shouldn't look at this as Microsoft looking to churn out cheap help to build Word 2025. That's just not what they're doing. Microsoft engineers aren't poorly compensated for their efforts. Their among the most highly-compensated coders out there.
In other words, Microsoft could save a good sum of money if they could spend less on coders. By increasing the supply of coders they could drive those costs down.
It isn't out of the goodness of their venomous heart that Microsoft is doing this. No, they're doing it to pay less money to people like you (assuming you're in IT).
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and future coders will cost a lot less, guaranteed.
Yes, so do buggy-whip assemblers.
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Shortages (be they product or labor shortages) are always caused by the same thing: too low of a price.
Pay programmers a salary that makes the job worth it, and programmers will appear to fill it.
Everything else is an attempt at weaseling out of this simple responsibility.
Re:The first few comments are awfully pessimistic (Score:5, Interesting)
I live in Redmond. Microsoft has enough coders. They just laid a bunch of them off. What they want are cheaper coders to throw at their projects. That's why they're working so hard to bring in lots of H1Bs. Many of the H1Bs are not earnestly brought here to do the work. They're just here to flood the market with tech workers to reduce tech wages for everyone.
Many of the MS H1Bs do end up leaving/escaping MS and working elsewhere in the region. Still, it isn't enough to get Seattle Tech wages down low enough (though they certainly are competitive vs. Silicon Valley wages). A big reason why Boeing has pushed hard to leave the Puget Sound region is because their engineering wages simply can't compete with the relatively high MS and Amazon wages for tech work.
OTOH, MS has done much to improve the quality of life here in Seattle, investing in infrastructure and museums and businesses and other perks to attract top programmers. Boeing has always sorta taken the opposite approach, opening their factories in the crappiest, drug-infested neighborhoods in a effort to keep costs down and making their quality-of-living investments elsewhere if possible.
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You missed my point. Your "world is becoming more and more reliant on computer technology" meets host website crashes.
Reliant software doesn't crash.
Delusional much? (Score:2)
I hate to be so harsh, but the amount of irrational bullshit that people spread deserves harsh responses and heavy criticism. Don't worry, citations are provided at the end of this post.
If this was really and truly "for the children" as you claim I want you to demonstrate that today's kids are smarter than kids 100 years ago. You can't, because facts do not back this at all. On average our IQ is 4-14 points lower today than it was 60 years ago. That is not a small measure, that is a huge measure. This
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For the record, I never stated that the people holding power are less intelligent than I. I would say many things, such as they are cruel, lacking empathy, lacking morality, but not stupid or ignorant. I have spent decades learning things that people hid from public view, and still seek information. These people learn it early because they are the ones that hid the information to begin with. They don't make the game impossible, because then it's not a game.
Do you consider that factory workers today are
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Sure they will. They're warm bodies that will accept below-market salaries. Yes, the product they turn out will be total shit, but it was CHEAP total shit, and that's really all that matters to the non-technical management types.
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With all due respect, your post does not seem to have much to do with what I posted at all.
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On average our IQ is 4-14 points lower today than it was 60 years ago.
Isn't the IQ scale norm-referenced within study groups? The average IQ in any demographic group is 100.
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One line response: Please explain why there are tech layoffs.
Thankfully most people don't know how to code (Score:1)
Including the Ex-Amazon and Ex-Microsoft dimwits I work with.
Re: Thankfully most people don't know how to code (Score:1)
This man speaks the truth, they are mostly like puppy mills for college grads.
Uber (Score:2)
Are you the same guys cheering the disruption of fossilized business models by foreign upstarts?
An Infinite Number of Monkeys with Keyboards? (Score:3)
Pathetic (Score:1)
These corporations will even exploit children to avoid paying a professional wage to qualified software engineers.
just waiting... (Score:2)
...to fork his repository.
Astroturf stuff as narrative for higher H1b quota (Score:5, Insightful)
FSF should do into schools (Score:1)
and teach the kids good copyright, software and business ethics.
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and teach the kids good copyright, software and business ethics.
RMS ... in K-12 schools ... OMG THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!
Why not use modern tech to just learn from RMS how to eat their own foot cheese [youtube.com].
Laugh (Score:2)
I just have this vision of coders as the next shortorder cooks.
Seeking Cheaper Coders (Score:3)
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...you do know what ".org" means, right?
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...you do know what ".org" means, right?
Nothing legally enforceable.
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Yes, and their about page, which the OP clearly didn't bother checking, says:
"Code.org is a registered public 501c3 nonprofit, with support from the general public."
Yeah, the .org by its self doesn't mean anything, but it does mean you should probably check for obvious answers to questions like "what is their business model?" before jumping straight to the conspiracy theories.
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It's all "so what?" to me (Score:1)
There's virtually no uni recognition of HS CS programs by university and little indication of that changing any time soon or ever. So, whatever code.org et al's motivations are it's just going to end on CS fading away again in K12.
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THANK YOU.
I am absolutely disgusted by the number of people on this thread who seem to be threatened by the idea of encouraging an early interest in CS. I've been volunteering with Hour of Code this week, meaning that, unlike everyone else I've seen on this thread, I actually have some first-hand knowledge about it. I've done the exercises myself, and have seen kids using them start to "get it". How many of them will keep with it? Idunno. But if more kids get into coding because they were given the right to
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You are talking to the crowd that every time robotics and AI come up, bring up Hollywood scenarios about metal overlords and shit. At this point I don't think many slashdotters, or at least the ones posting in the "muh jerbs" type of news, can tell reality from fiction.
I expected smarter from Slashdot, sincerely.
Something should be done! (Score:2)
These K-12 visa holders are taking our jobs!
Developers, Developers, Developers! (Score:2)
How about this idea:
Microsoft wants more developers using thier tools. They are having a problem getting experienced ones onto thier platform, so they are now training inexperienced ones the Microsoft way.
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No. Design is just as important as getting the right answer. More projects fail from bad design then from not working properly (entropy overtakes them until they can't add new features users want or the bugs start to creep in as new features are added due to poor compartmentalization).
Math helps. It helps a ton. Being able to use givens and rearrange a known set of variables to get to an answer is definitely critical. BUT - there is more to creating good software.
Starting early on how to think abstract
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"Starting early on how to think abstractly and to generalize with good interfaces is key"
And that's what maths is all about, my friend.