Mark Zuckerberg And John Doerr Donate $1M To Expand The Hour Of Code Campaign 24
theodp writes Techcrunch reports that Mark Zuckerberg has donated $500K to expand the Hour of Code campaign, which aims to reach 100 million students this year with its learn-to-code tutorials, including its top-featured tutorial starring Zuckerberg (video). Techcrunch adds that Zuckerberg's donation will be matched by fellow tutorial team teacher Bill Gates (video), Microsoft, Reid Hoffman, Salesforce, Google, and others. Zuck and Gates appear to have a sizable captive audience — a Code.org District Partnership Model brochure on the code-or-no-HS-diploma-for-you Chicago Public Schools' website calls for partner districts to "hold a district-wide Hour of Code event each year" for three years.
Re:Generosity knows no bounds... (Score:5, Insightful)
Supply and demand, etc.
Re: (Score:1)
Thanks for the UK average worker's equivalent of £3.78 Zuck. Much appreciated.
Does that mean (Score:4, Funny)
it will be 2 hours now?
Re: (Score:2)
It could be 2 hours without the extra $1M. Just hold it at 2am tomorrow and when DST ends there will be another hour.
Re: (Score:1)
It's true - where I live, you have to pay women more than men if you want them to "take it".
Ooh yeah.
What was the question?
Give it up already .... (Score:1)
From what I read on Slashdot, the likes of Zuckerberg and Gates meet every fucking day to work on their plans to drive IT wages down. Give it a rest!
Any REAL billionaire would be cruising around on their obscenely large yacht, snorting big mountains of coke, fucking the very finest hookers, shooting rare wildlife with machine-guns. You have enough money already you GREEDY FUCKS.
Zuckerberg and Gates are coge gurus? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is weirdly narcissistic. It's slightly less odd for a corporation like Google or Red Hat, although it falls into the category of corporate communications as shameless self-promotion. For Zuckerberg and Gates, it's very much an exercise in egomania. Firstly, they are not primarily known as actual code savants. They made their mark and fortune as managers/businessmen, not because of their raw technical savvy. Other people did the heavy technical lifting. So having them get up and wave the "code is the key" flag is factually misleading.
Secondly, having these people encourage a coding career is flat out hypocrisy. They have both been active advocates of unlimited 1H-B visa programs and have personally been responsible for shipping jobs out of the US. Zuckerberg in particular is outspoken about his anti-US worker sentiment. So now he want to train even more people to be out of a job in the US. I guess money can buy a cover up of anything.
Re: (Score:2)
Bennet Haselton himself could not have said it better. Longer, yes.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Everyone who receives a high school diploma is, in a sense, exposed to wiring a house. It is called the electricity unit in science. These units are a mandatory part of the science curriculum in the primary and secondary grades. They teach you everything you need to know to wire a house except how to do it to code.
In the same vein, I would argue that children and youth should be exposed to programming. It doesn't have to be a standalone course that you need to pass in order to graduate. It may be a uni
Re: (Score:2)
Their motivation is simple: They want a cheaper supply of IT labor so that they have more profits.
The impact of that on society per general employment, bubbles, etc. is not their care, for good or bad.
They expanded it... (Score:2)
Wages (Score:1)
This is just a glorified way of driving wages down for IT. The "Valley" got caught sending emails trying to do it the easy way, way back when. Now they've gotten clever about it.
Learn to code in an hour? I'm in! (Score:2)
Sixty minutes from now, I'm going to be an expert in Haskell comonads. This is awesome.
Tiny Donation (Score:2)
You can already learn coding on the web (Score:2)