Tech Leaders Encourage Teaching Schoolkids How To Code

rtoz writes "Code.org has released infographics and a video to explain why students should be taught to code in school. They've gathered support from leaders in politics and the tech industry. Mark Zuckerberg says, 'Our policy at Facebook is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find. There just aren't enough people who are trained and have these skills today.' Former U.S. President Bill Clinton adds, 'At a time when people are saying, "I want a good job – I got out of college and I couldn't find one," every single year in America, there is a standing demand for 120,000 people who are training in computer science.' Bill Gates said, 'Learning to write programs stretches your mind, and helps you think better, creates a way of thinking about things that I think is helpful in all domains.' Google's Eric Schmidt is looking beyond first-world countries: 'For most people on Earth, the digital revolution hasn't even started yet. Within the next 10 years, all that will change. Let's get the whole world coding!'" Part of the standing demand for computer science jobs may be influenced by bad policies from tech companies, like Yahoo's ban on working from home.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

People don't refuse programming jobs because they didn't learn how to do it in grade school.

People refuse programming jobs because they hate programming, and don't want to deal with the regular long hours, stress, and complete lack of job security that programming comes with.

Teaching more kids to program won't produce more people who want to do it for a living, but feel free to try.

Making the job worth learning the skill for, on the other hand, will motivate people (old and young) to self-educate. Of course...that might cost something....

Re:Bullshit

[phantomfive]

I'd bet talented engineers aren't generally interesting in getting hired by Facebook. Same with Microsoft: gotta hire them right out of college, before they learn better.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people are capable of being programmers, but they aren't capable of being good programmers. Most people just weren't born with the level of intelligence necessary to be such a thing, and evidence of this is everywhere.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[crazyjj]

Here's a video [youtube.com] to show you how tech companies in the U.S. today "recruit" American programmers.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[hackula]

This. I am convinced that swarms of "programmers" who gripe every time this subject comes up have not been in the programming job market in 10 years plus. Saying you cannot get through the HR filter is total BS. Any competent programmer knows how to put the right stuff on their resume to get hired. It takes like 20 minutes to add a few keywords to your resume and it takes about 20 minutes of wikipedia per BS keyword to get through an interview. Most interviews are dumbed down to the extreme anyways, since its so difficult to find programmers that you really cannot afford to scare any away. The outsourcing stuff is BS too since most programming involves proprietary data and there is no way in hell that most companies are going to put that in the hands of someone in India or China.

Re:Cheap labor trained with tax dollars

[srichard25]

I have been in the programming job market for more than 10 years and I am convinced that many big businesses artificially manufacture "shortages" just so that they can get H-1B Visas to hire foreign programmers for much cheaper. A local big business had 20-30 programming jobs on their website. I applied to many of them. Some of those jobs matched up word-for-word with my resume, yet I didn't get a single call back. Instead, we hear of a ton of new hires coming from India. Most of them moved into a new apartment complex right across from the big business. So many, in fact, that the apartment complex became known as "Little India". You can still see them walking across the street early in the morning and then back again very late at night. They work very long hours, are not able to simply change companies at will, and work for a lower salary. And all the big company had to do was claim that they couldn't find any US citizens to meet the job requirements.