Microsoft Co-opts Ice Bucket Challenge Idea To Promote Coding In Latin America 96
theodp writes: Microsoft is aiming to offer free programming courses to over a million young Latin Americans through its Yo Puedo Programar and Eu Posso Programar initiatives ("I Can Program"). People between the ages of 12 and 25 will be able to sign up for the free online courses "One Hour Coding" and "Learning to Program," which will be offered in conjunction with Colombia's Coding Week (Oct. 6-10). The online courses will also be available in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Puerto Rico. "One Hour Coding" (aka Hour of Code in the U.S.) is a short introductory course in which participants will learn how the technology works and how to create applications, and it offers "a playful immersion in the computer sciences," Microsoft said in a statement. In the virtual, 12-session "Learning to Program" course, students will discover that "technical complexity in application development tools is a myth and that everyone can do it," the statement added. Taking a page from the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge its execs embraced, Microsoft is encouraging students to complete the Hour of Code and challenge four other friends to do the same (Google Translate).
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No, they're creating cheap employees.
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Exactly, so if we changed the school curriculum to teach business courses (including sales and marketing) at an early age, there would be competition to companies like microsoft. This would lead to more businesses being created. With more businesses around, there would be intense competition for qualified or even average workers and employee wages would have to rise.
Right now, business is taught at a very late age to students -- near or above the age of 20 and is often prohibitively expensive. In other word
trying to buy ipad and Makerbot in 1980? (Score:5, Insightful)
> Erh... no. The supply side never created jobs. Never has, never will. A job is created if, and only if, there is someone willing and able to pay for the goods and/or services that job creates.
Yeah I remember back in 1980 we were all going into the stores trying to buy ipads and 3D printers. After we consumers did the R&Dand speced out exactly what kind of iPad we wanted to buy, Apple ordered some from China and started selling them.
Wait, maybe I'm remembering wrong. Maybe a bunch of companies hired a bunch of engineers, programmers, and product designers to come up with a variety of different computing devices, hoping that they'd come up with something people wanted to buy. Maybe people did not buy the first few tablet models, so for the first 15 years those companies were losing money trying. Maybe Maybe eventually one company, Apple, developed a version people would buy.
I don't remember for sure, which of those two scenarios actually happened?
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Neither of those scenarios happened, so you are remembering wrong.
Pad-like devices showed up in science fiction first. Some of the most visible examples are Star Trek (1966), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1978). Millions and millions of people were introduced to the concept of handheld computing devices through fiction and lots of those people wanted one.
One of those people was Alan Kay, who was a PhD candidate at the time. He developed the idea more fully into something
conveniently leave out Xerox, Apple (Score:2)
I notice you conveniently left Xerox out of the Dynabook story. The project originally called "the interim Dynabook" was renamed the Alto. Xerox had done the R&D to develop Kay's idea into a working machine. Around this time, Xerox owned part of Apple, so they invited Steve Jobs and other Apple people to Xerox Parc, where they had a look at the Alto (Dynabook) development version. The Apple folks really liked the GUI idea, so they worked and worked to transform it into something that could work
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I didn't conveniently leave anything out. I highlighted the introduction of the idea and the demand from people that existed before any company (including PARC) started developing the idea into an actual product.
The Dynabook concept was introduced two years before PARC was created, so it's a bit ridiculous to suggest that they created the idea.
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oh, don't bother. you can't resolve every stupid nitpick people bring up, and even if you did no one will bother reading past the "+5, Insightful" nitpick anyway.
fuck this place.
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Leaving out Xerox seems to be pretty common, and not just with tablets. Xerox was one of the first companies with a commercial "windowing" graphical interface too.
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That's completely correct. Only people without money create jobs. The homeless person down by the river employs 4 people now. My single mother neighbor who has been accepting government assistance since her ten year old boy was born employs 2 full time employees which is ip from one before the recession hit.
Now back to reality land. A job is created if enough funds are availible to compensate a person for the amount of value they add to an employer's product, service, or wealth. The ability to resell is no
Re: Intention? ... (Score:1)
Who wants to ride our dead horsey? Anyone? .. It's the same as indebted servitude for wizard clicking monkeys. This hour of code is considered an advanced degree in their countries, now they'll get sponsored H1 visas.. How come MS won't sponsor these programs in U.S. Or for anyone over 25? That's discrimination.
Now that the profits are going out of the country, MS needs to recruit outside of the country and keep the loyalty to the monopoly because the programmers and consum
Ditch diggers and codemonkeys (Score:1)
The one percent will always need them.
Re:1 hour experience (Score:5, Funny)
Especially if that framework has only existed for 15 minutes.
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They guess, you will continue to learn after this hour, because you want to extend your program to do more cool stuff.
no Americans need apply (Score:2, Insightful)
Nope, no programming jobs for American programmers. America is only for MBAs and bureaucrats. Programmers are elsewhere. Americans who don't want to be team players in the farcical football game that is the American "workplace" must necessarily be homeless and destitute, because there are no real jobs in America, none at all. Real work is done in the Overseas, not in America, because America is the land of the worthless.
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I'm sorry. I didn't know that programming was something that only Americans were allowed to do. We'll just keep it a secret, then.
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and I'm sorry. I'm sure an American company known for abusing the H1-B visa program really has pure intentions when trying to raise a generation of coders in a third-world country, rather than promoting such educational programs in their own country of residence.
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Nope, no programming jobs for American programmers. America is only for MBAs and bureaucrats. Programmers are elsewhere. Americans who don't want to be team players in the farcical football game that is the American "workplace" must necessarily be homeless and destitute, because there are no real jobs in America, none at all. Real work is done in the Overseas, not in America, because America is the land of the worthless.
Last I looked at the map, Brazil was part of America.
From your bedroom to your computer... (Score:2, Flamebait)
You know, Rosalita from the Goonies (the 85s Steven Spielberg movie)? Everyone used to have a Latino maid, worker, dishwasher, grease-monkey doing all the hard work you don't want to. And then all the good jobs was outsourced to brainy India who had both the means and poverty to make it happen. Today most programmers come from India.
Microsofts idea is nothing but pure genious. Remember the issues America have with skilled immigration these days?
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Keep pursuing the cheapest labour and pretty soon you will have no one to sell your code to, as no one will be afford to buy the devices to put the code on. It's all about balanced economies, not the greatest possible exploitation, not unlimited growth, not the highest possible productivity which in reality implies the cheapest possible labour (when will you guys and gals wake up to that one, what did you really think all that spin about increasing productivity really meant).
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Or he really was clothed and they made a point of mentioning he was clothed because there are people who will infer autoerotic asphyxiation regardless of the facts.
Everybody does not need to program (Score:1)
And judging by the problems many people have with word problems, not everybody has the analytical aptitude for even simple programs. By the way, how's that H1B visa trouble going, Microsoft?
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^^^
Complexity (Score:3, Informative)
In the virtual, 12-session "Learning to Program" course, students will discover that "technical complexity in application development tools is a myth and that everyone can do it," the statement added.
Well, I guess that avoids scaring the beginners away. But really, modern programming is often about managing hugely complex codebases with hundreds of thousands of lines of code. It's not the end of the world, and all that can be managed, but beyond writing some just-add-water toy apps, the technical complexity certainly is there.
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"Everyone can do it". Therefore, you're worthless. We'll give you an instruction pamphlet on signing up for food stamps when you are hired, though!
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In the virtual, 12-session "Learning to Program" course, students will discover that "technical complexity in application development tools is a myth and that everyone can do it," the statement added.
Well, I guess that avoids scaring the beginners away. But really, modern programming is often about managing hugely complex codebases with hundreds of thousands of lines of code. It's not the end of the world, and all that can be managed, but beyond writing some just-add-water toy apps, the technical complexity certainly is there.
My experience with people assigned to a task which requires some level of programming and the person has little to no experience much less aptitude has been unsurprisingly negative. But these people tend to be very adept at office politics so they get protected by management while anyone competent either develops severe mental illness or escapes from the "team" as quickly as possible. Why do corporate executives think programming is trivial?
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They do not think progrsmming is trivial. They think that as long as the magic smoke doesn't escape, the computer can do anything if the right incantations are being used.
Seriously, a lot of them simply have no idea that it involes much more that downloading something or putting a disk in the coffe cup holder and click the right buttons in the right order. And when you do your job programming correctly, it is all they functionally need to know. It is a catch 22 i guess.
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A journey of a 1000 miles begins with one step.
Everybody starts programming with toy apps, like Hello World.
Yes, complexity exists. But you start by showing people it's not magic and incomprehensible, and then go from there.
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Companies have a big incentive to train all the foreigners how to program at an early age, then have them take American jobs for pennies on the dollar when they're old. Save your money, programming is going to make peanuts in the near future.
SFTU, n00b. In 2003, when I was getting out of college, offshoring to India was all the rage. It looked like the apocalypse for software devs in the US.
A decade later, yep, were walking around in a bombed out career wasteland with no jobs to be found, dreaming of what it would be like if there were large companies trying to hire the best devs and offering huge salaries and perks for that privilege. Oh wait. No, we aren't. Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, et al, all do that. FFS, WhatsApp just got bought
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Oh, FFS, you mean to tell me you never read a tutorial or stackexchange?
Those things were not available to me in 1986, when I wrote my first game. The computer came with a reference for BASIC. I read it. I started programming. I went to the library to get more information. I programmed some more. I got my hands on the computer reference. I programmed some more. I don't ever recal reading something called a "tutorial", but I do remember reading a lot of other peoples code published in magazines.
It seems (Score:2)
All tech giants really want is cheap labor, making tech giants a threat.
Ice Bucket Challenge....? (Score:1)
That's... not how the ice bucket challenged worked. The challenge was to EITHER pay $100 to a charity OR perform an action. So this is taking a page out of the ice bucket challenge . . . in . . . absolutely no ways whatsoever.
Re:Ice Bucket Challenge....? (Score:5, Insightful)
It is more like a chain letter, but in reverse.
It should be: "Get 4 other people to sign up OR Microsoft will teach you how to code"
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Why is op modded Troll?
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What does this have to do with the ice bucket
The ice bucket challenge was a ploy to secure funding. This is also a ploy to secure funding.
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Yep.. but i don't think it is about jobs like most seem to jump to. I think it is about trying to tie future employment to MS products to avoid these countries from gravitating to cheaper opensource platforms and thereby making MS somewhat irrelevant in those markets. Right now, the biggest driver of MS products in those areas is compatability with US and other prefominate MS businesses. But as anymosity grows against the NSA and other spy agencies and the governments behind them along with the interoperabi
Personal profit == funding? (Score:2)
The amount of funds that actually goes to ALS research from the Ice Bucket challenge is a very low percentage, while the people in charge of the charity are paying themselves well over living wages on the same charity dime. If you research various charities you will find that this is not a unique practice. I personally am very careful where my donations go, and would not donate to this one. This "charity" claims that 72.4% of the donations for "program expenses" which includes salaries. Here [charitynavigator.org] is a source
Less Ice Bucket Challenge. (Score:1)
More 'Chain Letter' spam.
Screw M$ (Score:1)
Have fun with that when the self driving trucks hit the road in ~5 years. Maybe a Latin American will be programming them by then.
Shut down this Anti-American company (Score:1)
Ice bucket? Rather bucket of proceeding against this Anti-American company. They plainly hate USA and and American workers.
This company should be dissolved already. One day they cry about not being able to find people to fulfill jobs opening and next day lobbying for increase in H1B visas.
We should identify companies like this and asked to move to India, China or Korea. If you hate America there is no place here for you.
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There is so much wrong with what you say, that every word coming from you is faulty. American computer programmers earned their qualifications upon their own merit. Most of them went to college and worked hard for many years, spending tens of thousands of dollars, for a hard earned college degrees in some of the most challenging academic courses. After they have spent, many tens of thousands, even in excess of a hundred grand, and many years of hard work on their college degree, with the promise that their
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I dont know how many times this must be repeated. The US and its resources belongs exclusively to the people of the country. The United States is the native born American people. The government is merely constituted for the purpose of defending their territorial domain from foreign incursions and serving the exclusive interests of the citizens. Are the citizens of any country the sole ones with exclusive right to employment within it? Yes. That is an essential part of very definition of what a country, citi
?Puedo programar con Visual Studio RT? (Score:2)
Dang it Slashdot, the Spanish opening question mark is not an RTL override!
I think the problem is that Microsoft is known for selling computing devices that use technical measures to prevent their users from programming them. Can this Yo Puedo Programar course be completed on a Surface RT tablet? If not for entering code, then what's that keyboard for? How about on a Nokisoft phone with an HDMI monitor and a Bluetooth keyboard?
Fuck (Score:2)
Ageism (Score:1)
Wow (Score:2)
It could hardly be more nakedly transparent. "These skills are expensive among our people, so third worlders please line up to train for your sweatshop jobs. At least a few of you will have aptitude, if we screen enough of you. We will pay you comparatively nothing so we can make more buckets of money, and you will like it because it's still more than you get now."
And now, I fully expect to be tarred and feathered, for how awful and insensitive I am for merely noticing that the tech companies are doing this
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Nothing wrong with that if you want to drink like a fish. Likewise, if the Central Americans want to learn to program, sign up
ALS foundation invented the chain letter? (Score:2)
The one-year view of world history seems to those of us older than about twelve to be somewhat short-sighted.