Amazon Pledges $700 Million To Teach Its Workers to Code (wired.com) 144
Amazon announced Thursday that it will spend up to $700 million over the next six years retraining 100,000 of its US employees, mostly in technical skills like software engineering and IT support. From a report: Amazon is already one of the largest employers in the country, with almost 300,000 workers (and many more contractors) and it's particularly hungry for more new talent. The company currently has more than 20,000 vacant US roles, over half of which are at its headquarters in Seattle. Meanwhile, the US economy is booming, and there are now more open jobs than there are unemployed people who can fill them, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. "The purpose isn't really to create a job ladder from fulfillment center to CEO, but rather to meet employees where they are and to create opportunities for them to build on the skills that they have," Ardine Williams, Amazon's vice president of workforce development, said in an interview Thursday morning. Amazon joins a number of other companies who have announced multimillion-dollar investments in retraining in recent years, as a tightening labor market and technological change forces businesses to evolve. Amazon has already spent thousands of dollars on worker retraining in its Career Choice program, which helps hourly associates pay for degree programs in other, high-demand fields. CEO Jeff Bezos said in a shareholder letter last year that more than 12,000 US employees have participated in the program since it began in 2012. Amazon said they will expand the program Thursday.
Re:Teach them the right skills (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazon isn't interested in making sure they'll always have a job they want to flood the talent market and water down salaries as much as possible. That is the big motive behind laying off IT workers and pushing 6mo-2yr labor recycling and over specialized requirements for hire. It lets them pretend there are massive labor shortages and bring in hundreds of thousands of foreign workers. The big push to convince women they want to work in tech is about flooding incoming labor rate with 55-60% more bodies.
In the end they want to be able to work tech staff harder (mostly about developers) and pay them much less (developers and the rest). The reality is there is plenty of talent but they need to pay the people they call engineers like engineers (250k+ outside California/NY) and their billions in revenue show that staff brings the returns to justify it. The rest of the non-technical world doesn't understand what is happening and has very little sympathy for people making better than median income as starting pay (55-75k) but it IS a problem for our economy.
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I mean, they bitch that they have labor people, struggling to make it on $15 or whatever.
Then, they complain that robots and automation will kick them out of jobs.
Now...somehow, training them to be able to take higher end jobs so they can better their place in life, is now a bad thing too? What gives?
Is the ONLY solution these folks w
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"Employ our citizens with better paying jobs and keep the $$ inside our economy."
It is better than using foreign workers. Flooding the market with unneeded workers means lots of people who can't get jobs in this field, particularly experienced workers who earn more leaving people earning and deserving six figure salaries retraining into fields paying 20-50k/yr and defaulting on their liabilities in the process. This would be great if they were actually creating new jobs but they aren't, the "new" jobs are j
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makes profits by actually creating new value instead of actually investing hundreds of millions into reducing wages?
No company is going to be able to compete properly if they don't spend continuous effort to lower their cost.
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Compete properly? Their revenues are off the charts.
There are all sorts of costs you can lower though it is usually better for everyone if you focus on selling more and making more desirable products rather than making your products cheaper.
But if you are running a dairy farm, starving your cows and mixing them into the local markets to establish a new "lower feed" standard which nets you a higher number of starved cows to make up the difference might be a good plan for you but it is a shit plans for the co
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Compete properly? Their revenues are off the charts.
Yes, and they've achieved that through very aggressive cost cutting everywhere they can.
if you focus on selling more and making more desirable products rather than making your products cheaper.
Making the same products cheaper is really helpful if you want to sell more.
highly skilled creative workers get better over time and produce more value with less work
Their revenues are off the charts, I think they know what they're doing.
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"Their revenues are off the charts, I think they know what they're doing."
Their concerns aren't the only concerns. There are a lot more of us than them.
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Err....well, if you are not a customer or an employee of theirs, then why should they care or pay attention to you at all?
This doesn't just apply to Amazon, but any company or person.
No one is special and requires any person or entity to be 'concerned' about them if they don't have any type of relationship with them.
Hell, who has time for that? I'm more than busy enough with those people and entities I do have relationships wi
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Us in this case would be employees and customers of theirs. Who isn't a customer of theirs at this point?
"No one is special and requires any person or entity to be 'concerned' about them if they don't have any type of relationship with them."
Everyone in the US has a relationship with them. Last I checked we are subsidizing their operations with tax credits, roads, military protection, diplomatic support and treaties, legislation, legal protection in courts for their industry practices, artificial intellectu
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Let’s Godwin this - by your measure of success, the Nazi death camps were the ideal - maximizing productivity by intentionally working people to death, no worrying about retirement pensions, sic
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Amazon isn't the only game in town....you CHOOSE to work for them.
As to your Nazi example....that was compulsory, working for Amazon is not.
BIG difference in your analogy.
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Amazon with it’s *training* program works out to $7,000 a head, all paid for by taxpayers since its 100% tax deductible by Amazon. Worse, it gives them a ready supply of people who will have to sign up for *advanced* courses (and pay for them) and a way to
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"BIG difference in your analogy."
But in our society working is compulsory and thanks the work of John Nash companies collaborate in the form of standard industry practices realizing they all get more benefit and more certain benefit by all screwing over workers than by competing over treating workers better.
In this case the workers aren't choosing anything, Amazon and the other major tech companies are wrecking the labor market for fun and profit. Luckily most don't subscribe to your level of extreme capita
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"keep fucking up stuff you told them not to touch because they want to show off their new leet mad coding skillz."
You know people often laugh when I tell them we'd be better off hiring high school grads directly than college interns/grads and h1bs at entry level but I'm not kidding. You mix them with a couple proven and experienced rockstars and they learn not just skills but attitude and approach to problems from those rockstars. You are far more likely to develop the kind of resources who become rockstars
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Well, while I applaud giving poorly trained folks opportunity to learn higher skills and better themselves, I'm not kidding myself that this will be an opportunity taken by all of them NOR do I anticipate all that do tr
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"I don't see a program such as this as realistically flooding the market with new high end code monkeys displacing 6 figure experienced IT folks."
I doubt it has less success than the diploma mill imports who displace what 200k of the 65k+ workers a year? At some point it builds its own momentum, those foreign imports who did succeed get into a position to preferentially hire more foreign imports.
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cayenne8 works for the government. Citizens only. He doesn't have to worry about H1Bs.
But if *you* worry about them it's because you're too shit to compete.
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"But if *you* worry about them it's because you're too shit to compete."
Competing isn't the issue, expanding the labor pool and driving down wages is.
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Besides, your rote code monkey these days, isn't really making 6 figures are they in general?
Of course they are -- you forgot to account for the pennies and tens-of-pennies slot.
Heck, also pay 'em 1/3 of a dollar and you'll have as many decimal figures as you require.
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You can fuck off now.
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Now...somehow, training them to be able to take higher end jobs so they can better their place in life, is now a bad thing too? What gives?
There are a limited number of people any company like Amazon needs to employ in coding positions.
Just like Amazon isn't going to hire a million executive board members, even if for some reason they suddenly decided to make specialized board-position-specific training available to everyone.
I believe the basic argument people are making is that the market demand is alr
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You can’t develop a software developer for $7,000 a head. Anyone who says otherwise, whether it’s Amazon or a troll on slashdot, is so obviously full of shit that you have to examine their motives. This sounds like a ploy to get the government to kick in tax credits and funds. Definitely not an initiative to help their workers. Not at $7,000 to produce a programmer.
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That depends. One can certainly turn oneself into a software developer for $7k/head or even for free if one pays their basic expenses some other way. What is harder to find is the talent, the knowledge is all online and freely available, the ability to utilize it in ways that aren't just regurgitating the professors clever wit on problems which don't relate to the coursework you've been doing, have done, or can discover you will be doing soon or possibly even the normal skillset for your work... not so much
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The problem with the Talent Market, is that it isn't uniformed.
East Cost Software Developers are normally older, more experience, have found a solid methodology in their work. They work for companies who's job isn't to make software to sell, but make software to support the business.
West Cost Software Developers are normally younger, less experience, open to different ways doing work. They will work for companies who job is to make software/software services which they sell.
Yes this is a generalization an
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However these kids moved to Silicon Valley to try to get these high tech jobs, however because everyone is doing that finding work is hard, and the amount of pay for the quality of life is very low.
Where are they living?
In a van down by the river(bay)?
Re:Teach them the right skills (Score:4, Interesting)
50K a year in Upstate NY for example gives you a good middle class life style. You can get a modest home and you are able to support a family.
75k a year in Silicon Valley, they can probably get a small apartment, perhaps with a roommate. They may choose to commute further to get a home.
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Where are they living?
In a van down by the river(bay)?
In some cases, yes. [businessinsider.com]
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Usually in a house with 5 others like them.
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"But the point is there may be a Glut of employees in an areas, while other areas don't have enough"
That is just another one of the strategies for creating the appearance of a shortage. Pretty much universally these jobs require absolutely no physical presence. People could work in Silicon Valley or NY doing development from rural Alabama. So they go in cycles. We had been in a remote cycle which lets companies justify outsourcing, as a bonus they shift requirements back to a physical presence saying "it ju
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"But the point is there may be a Glut of employees
Yeah but there is no reason you can't live in upstate NY and do the work needed in Silicon Valley. There is no justification.
The justification is shitty managers who have no in-depth knowledge of what they’re trying to produce, hired by shitty investors who think that because they were able to raise funding this somehow qualifies them as experts in building a business in the target field.
money talks, but in Silly Valley it’s mostly bullshit-speak. Everyone running a con. It’s what rebrands a bunk in a room as a $1,600 a month pod.
so much for living the dream. And a budget of $7,000 a head for *training* is ju
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They don't, they expect to hire people on short contracts and cycle through them at lower and lower or even just the same wages while the other tech companies do the same. These workers will jump for the chance and that will "prove" to the market that these are appropriate wages.
I wouldn't be surprised if some of these companies start hiring hundreds or even thousands of developers for lower skilled work in rural facilities just so they can keep the "average salary" on census reports low as well. Starting s
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Teach them not to piss in bottles.
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Einstein on Common Sense.
We need UNcommon sense.
oh, that's all we need... (Score:4, Insightful)
thousands more $12 an hour coders. geez....
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What gets me is the sheer, concentrated stupidity of this move. It has been known for ages that having more coders does not make you faster on project completion. The only way to accelerate things and also the only way to improve quality is using fewer, much more competent people. You know, like it is done in any other engineering discipline.
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Short term, more money would be spent. Long term, your existing coders would become better at the task at hand.
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Amazon is taking over the world (Score:2)
And as has been pointed out they want cheaper coders. As it stands programmer is still a middle class job paying $45-$85k/yr and up. Amazon aims to change that.
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That much is obvious. The thing is that cheaper coders end up being much, much more expensive. Amazon should know that but apparently they do not.
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It drives down wage demands.
eg. "You're asking for $78K?? I've got 10 other guys in the waiting room interviewing for this job. They'll do it for $70K."
even though they know that they'd never actually hire 8 of the 10 guys because they aren't competent enough.
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What needs to happen is production line style coding. Where you have different people doing, different elements of coding. Designing the overall program structure, writing code, editing code and providing notation, testing code, bug fixing code and finally refining code. Different kinds of people in different roles. That will speed up programming a lot. They should not be using small business style coding practices in major coding businesses, they need to get the coding production line going.
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We cannot do that. In fact, it is unknown whether this can work at all. Coding is inherently not a mechanical task, or we would have it automated a long time ago.
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What gets me is the sheer, concentrated stupidity of this move. It has been known for ages that having more coders does not make you faster on project completion. The only way to accelerate things and also the only way to improve quality is using fewer, much more competent people.
Neither is universally true. It depends on the details.
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Unfortunately a very valid point.
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Don't worry, you get what you paid for. They might only make $12 an hour, but it will take 100 of them to equal the productivity of a single good developer!
I have good news and bad news. (Score:3)
We're going to have to let you go, as a robot doesn't ask for wages. But we'll pay you to train your replacement.
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Just take the deal and train the replacement person inadequately, so that they are guaranteed to need further training to succeed and do things right (after you are long gone and only available with a retainer at a high contracted rate).
Didn't we hear this song before? (Score:2)
For blue collar workers? Right before the programming jobs got shipped off to India?
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Actually, no.
IN the past all you heard was "you're fired" and then you found out your job had been outsourced abroad.
Or, if you did hear something in advance, it was "ok, you are being replaced, but you can stay on awhile before then to train your replacement"
Training blue collar workers to try to help them gain more valuable skills to improve their life is relatively new to me, and I"ve been in the workforce a pretty l
Employer Education is important. (Score:4, Interesting)
An Employee who feels stuck at their job, will undoubtedly either quit for a better opportunity, or begin to unperformed at their job.
Employer Education which if used properly can allow Employees to move up, or to different areas, where they feel like they are climbing the ladder and not stuck. Allows the company to keep employees who have a good idea on the business processes and needs less retraining.
Yes Training an employee may lead to them Quitting the job for a better opportunity now that they are trained. However this is a good thing too, as that current position being quieted from is probably has been tiresome to that employee, thus you can replace them with a better employee who is more eager for that job, without having to feel bad about firing someone.
In many ways a good education push, is cheaper then laying off your workforce, because you just don't replace the missing jobs.
Great idea for those that can learn (Score:4, Interesting)
Some of the better coders I have worked with in various companies, come from people who were in other areas of the company internally then learned to code...
The advantage they brought was tremendous understanding of what the company was actually doing, how a lot of larger pieces fit - and a better understanding of how people actually used software. They could often write vastly better testing scenarios and could catch subtle business process errors in the design phase.
I don't think they are going to be able to just take anyone and really train them how to code, some people it will just not stick with and they will not enjoy it. But even with a somewhat low percentage of success this could be of large benefit to Amazon in unseen ways.
About the last thing we need (Score:3)
More mediocre and bad IT people and bad coders is the absolutely _last_ thing needed. The whole problem with insecure systems and software, unreliable software, etc. stems from us already having far too many of those.
Re: About the last thing we need (Score:1)
Right because I'm sure you are so experienced you never made a code mistake in your life. Probably so l33t you rolled with your own kernel at 6 months old because Linux wasn't cutting it. Didn't even need any education to become a good coder because the last thing we would ever need is someone learning to code.
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More mediocre and bad IT people and bad coders is the absolutely _last_ thing needed.
10 PRINT "Penus!"
20 GOTO 20
Bad coders? Why would you say that?
Fix existing turnover first (Score:5, Insightful)
The average tenure of an Amazon software developer is 1.1 years. Maybe they should spend their money on making Amazon a place that existing developers aren't so eager to leave.
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1.1 years is the average time for the extraction of a soul. So, that's really not going to change...
That's how averages work (Score:3)
Having an short average tenure is skewed by the fact that many Amazon workers started recently; there are many new workers compared to old workers. 130,000 new hires in 2017 alone.
If you're implying that Amazon is a bad place to work, then the quit rate is the statistic you want.
It would pay better (Score:2)
if they taught them how to provision, secure, deploy and maintain Amazon Cloud instances.
Learning to code is one thing, learning to code well is entirely another thing.
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if they taught them how to provision, secure, deploy and maintain Amazon Cloud instances.
Learning to code is one thing, learning to code well is entirely another thing.
Amazon gives short shrift to securing cloud instances.
They just want that monthly CC transaction from the customer.
Oh, and have fun understanding what services and options you actually chose and paid for.
A mighty outpouring of software... (Score:2)
Presumably Amazon will measure its workers' coding productivity, and routinely fire all who write fewer than 1,000 lines per day.
The crackdown on H1B's might be working (Score:2)
Training became passe once companies could import cheap H1-B's.
This initiative might be an indicator that the crackdown is working.
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Yes... If so this is a nice effect initially. Just wish they would not focus exclusively on coding.
I agree that trying training is a much better thing than importing workers to effectively abuse by underpaying, as its investing in the development of people inside the US with greater opportunity as well, and this will help move our country forward, as in people can take knowledge of technology learned and start new businesses
inside or outside of Amazon, and this is empowering for people wh
So not better pay, conditions, and benefits? (Score:3)
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Umm, I think the point is that being a coder provides better pay, working conditions, and benefits than working in the warehouse trying to compete with automation.
Amazon has a plan to fix that. All those interns working for free ...
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Consider the U6 rate (Score:2)
"there are now more open jobs than there are unemployed people who can fill them".
If you include discouraged job-seekers and the underemployed, i.e. the U6 rate of unemployment, it's a much different picture. The Bureau reports there were 7.8 million vacancies in April 2019, and that there are 11.7 million unemployed under the U6 metric, leaving a labor overage of almost 4 million. (granted, a lot of those vacancies may be for specialized, highly-skilled positions, which a 30-hour/wk'er at Walmart, or a kid
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Define 'blowing up'. To some companies, that means moving above federal minimum wage.
Teach Them C and Verilog! (Score:2)
Verilog is the official language of the Gods of the hardware!
With C and Verilog and a decent FPGA, they can then create a real marvel of engineering and be an icon for the entire college of life!
Luv and Peace!
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Maybe. I know the C programming language very very well and probably wrote more than a quarter of a million lines of networked application code, but I cannot make heads or tales of much kernel code... Could be there's more to being a "guardian of the kernel" than knowing the programming languages involved.
Raise the Salary (Score:2)
See if you raised the salaries, you know where they should be based on the market conditions, you would have no problem finding employees.
Put your profits back into the company, you'll have a steady stream of workers, with increased earnings. Piss them way on investors and you will be scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to find someone who can spell their name and you have to explain to
They must be feeling the crunch (Score:2)
Idea for new AWS service? (Score:2)
CaaS - Coding as a Service
Create project/function/datatype specification in this standardized XML format, and our team of coders
will fill in sources in the programming language of choice translating your natural language description text into an actual
implementation.
Why? (Score:2)
If one is working in one of Amazon's depots moving boxes around, why would they want to learn to code? Does learning to code make the administrative staff more efficient at their jobs? In fact, who benefits from learning to code in their jobs, except for those who have to code? Who (hopefully) already know how to do so.
This sounds like another initiative from a hi-tech company to strive to flood the labor market with people with skills that said company wants to have at slave wages.
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It's amazing, but the people currently moving boxes around don't have to keep moving boxes around forever.
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It's amazing, but the people currently moving boxes around don't have to keep moving boxes around forever.
That’s the plan. They will eventually be automated out of a job. Same as Uber. This whole coding thing will just produce tax breaks and unemployable not-really-coders. Their program works out to $7,000 a head. Where are they setting up - China?
Don't believe it (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a ploy to back up their claim that the number of H1-Bs needs to be increased. There are plenty of over-40 software engineers that they could be hiring, but instead they figure out how to avoid hiring them.
On the other hand, maybe it is a way to drive down programmer costs since a $15/hr warehouse worker might be happy as a $30/hour coder.
Is no one going to point out how small this is? (Score:5, Interesting)
$700 million over the next six years retraining 100,000 of its US employees
That's $7k per employee over 6 years, or less than $1200 per year. That's a 2-day offsite training (once you include travel costs) or maybe a 2-week onsite class. That's barely enough to keep existing coders up-to-date with the latest developments in their tools.
Most warehouse workers can't be coders (Score:2)
I'd be interested in working on AWS, but I've heard even corporate Amazon is miserable to work for if you don't want to spend your entire life at work. People we've been getting where I'm at with Amazon experience basically say it's OK in short stints but they work you to death in exchange for getting Amazon on your resume so you can move on. Maybe if they improved working conditions, more people would be interested in applying and they wouldn't have to retrain existing staff. But with tech companies in gen
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Are Amazon workers smart enough? (Score:2)