Slashdot Mirror
The Yin and Yang of Hour of Code & Immigration Reform
theodp writes "The weeklong Hour of Code kicks off tomorrow, with Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates doing their part to address a declared nationwide CS crisis by ostensibly teaching the nation's schoolchildren how to code. But a recent NY Times Op-Ed by economist Paul Collier criticizing Zuckerberg's FWD.us PAC as self-serving advocacy (echoing earlier criticism) serves as a reminder that Zuckerberg and Gates' Code.org and Hour of Code involvement is the Yin to their H-1B visa lobbying Yang. The two efforts have been inextricably linked together for Congress, if not for the public. And while Zuckerberg argues it's 'the right thing to do', Collier argues that there are also downsides to the tech giants' plans to shift more bright, young, enterprising people from the poorest countries to the richest. 'An open door for the talented would help Facebook's bottom line,' Collier concludes, 'but not the bottom billion.'"
Uses complex offshore shell companies in order to not pay taxes to fund roads, schools, community, civilization.
Wont train Americans (or anyone else) in IT, actively seeking to import labor again that someone else paid for their education
how is this company even got a voice in America? in the old days they would be run out of town or worse
today ? fuck you you i got mine and there is nothing you can do to stop me
Consider the interests of the would-be reformer.
They just don't want to play American wages.
yeah spending hundreds of millions of dollars eradicating diseases like malaria in poor countries is so immoral...oh right but you only care that Windows is closed source.
To be fair, Gates got that money by breaking the law. His unfair competition resulted worldwide adoption of an insecure system, causing untold hardship across the industry (against more robust systems with few security flaws).
Should we cheer Al Capone for the good he was doing for Chicago?
I'm just getting off about ten years of unemployment as a software engineer. I'm competent, I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University, and my major pass time at home is programming. For whatever reason I couldn't seem to find a job. I put out thousands of resumes on monster and Dice, but had less than ten interviews in ten years. Thankfully I just recently got a job doing hardware. It is just weird what this world can do to you. No matter how much talent you have, or how hard you work, if no one wants to give you a chance, the world is a rough place. I think lots of people are seeing this today with the lack of jobs for even talented individuals.
Anyway, that is my point. There are plenty of talented and educated people in this country. The tech companies just don't want to pay a fair wage in a regular display of union busting. I know my story might be on the edge of a bellcurve, but I'm just saying I understand personally what it is like to never get a chance at a job. If you don't watch, it can grind into your very self worth.
God spoke to me
I have friend with decades of film production experience and he is de facto unemployable. The jobs are outsourced, or filled by 1H-B holders. He can't find work outside the film industry because he is "overqualified". When he applies for retail like Target or Starbucks, they don't want him because younger workers are easier to push around and abuse.
If you think that you are immune because you are "a professional", just wait. Get 10 or 15 years of experience and watch that become the reason that you won't be hired.
Meanwhile, Wall Street hits new highs on a regular basis. There is a direct causal relationship going on here. The wealth going to the rich is being siphoned from the rest of society. If things don't change the US will have a economic/social structure like the Spanish speaking part of the Americas. Don't be surprised when this happens, you had plenty of warning.
Why is Snark Required?
The need four-year degree is the issue as well.
Most community colleges don't offer them
Lot's of IT / tech classes are offed non degree and some should be able to take classes and get some for doing that with out having to commit to the full degree time table.
Also the college Tenure system leads to people with little to no real IT skills teaching the classes VS community / tech schools with real pros teaching.
I'm just getting off about ten years of unemployment as a software engineer.
How closely were your loss of your job and subsequent inability to get another one correlated with your claims of God talking to you? http://www.goodnewsjim.com/
Actually up until the point of the gates foundation, Bill Gates was the ultimate Scrooge. He gae away not one penny, it wasn't until he was called out on that very fact that the Gates foudration was formed.
Even much of the supposedly altruistic efforts also seem to have an angle:
http://m.slashdot.org/story/171367
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/07/31/bill-gates-corporate-profit-vs-humanity.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Philanthropy
To be fair, AC's probably too busy with a Ying Yang Twins track whispering in their ear to think straight.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Have you considered that the lack of viable competition might have been the result of robust set of anti-competitive practices? Also, by grossly oversimplifying things like you did, you forget that things weren't all that simple. MS was strong-arming OEMs if they dared to install competing OS's or browsers, and they ignored standards in IE while actively breaking compatibility of plugins.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
OK, I'll bite No way you go 10 years unemployed as a software engineer in the US. Unless:
a. you are lazy
b. you are incompetent
c. you printed the website you have in your sig on your resume
But most likely, it's just all BS.
His plan is essentially to produce enough low-quality** "code monkey"programmers to mirror the situation in 'service' jobs (e.g. retail), where there's a great enough excess of would-be employees even without H1Bs to force wages down into the minimum-wage part-time range. The reduction in incomes tends to have a ripple effect up through the ranks, so companies like Facebook couldd be able to slash their payroll/benefits costs down to a tiny fraction of what they are now. The only people fucked over would be the people doing the actual work.
**Keep in mind that people living under those circumstances typically end up working two part-time jobs, under a great deal of stress, and not sleeping or eating terribly well; this means the vast majority of the talented ones too weary at the end of the day to focus on learning new skills, and thus would find it very, very difficult to rise above entry-point. The company wouldn't care, of course, as it will be able to continue hiring skilled/educated affluent new grads very cheaply, and the fear of potentially being replaced the same way is likely to keep them from even asking for a raise for a number of years even as they gain experience & learn new skills.
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
Agreed both Billgates and Zuckererg are great businessmen, but it is pushing it a bit too hard and too far to make them "exemplified coders", because on both of these characters resides charges (or rumors) of "having built an empire by taking other's codes". So I wonder what kind of good example that would be, "yeah son, steal or buy your friend's code, market it and be rich" :p, sure thing if you want to make your kid into a business man, bad if you want to have a bright kid just for the sake of brag right: "I fork problem solver"!
+$3|v3n
Every time an H1B story is posted here, we get a lot of Tea Party-type comments from people
No you don't. I've been reading Slashdot for years and have never seen Tea Party members of any kind post against LEGAL immigration, which is healthy. In fact most of us stick up for H1B guys because we know a lot of them... it's the liberals who cry that H1B are stealing jobs from America and need to be banned.
The problem the Tea Party has is with illegal immigrants, which generally are not nearly as desirable or productive members of society (and who would expect they would be when the very act of coming here starts out by committing a crime?)
It's criminal how you and others cannot seem to distinguish between legal and illegal immigration, which are vastly different things.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...Microsoft decided to "cut off their air supply" (their words) by releasing Internet Explorer (a browser they purchased from a company called Spyglass after Navigator's release) as part of Windows. Not just as an app that happened to ship with Windows, but as a necessary PART OF WINDOWS...
The skeeziest part of that deal actually wasn't Microsoft's attack on Netscape - it was their raw screwing of Spyglass. For those who don't remember this history, Microsoft licensed Mosaic (which they re-branded as Internet Explorer) from Spyglass for a minimal quarterly licensing fee plus a cut of the revenue from every copy of the browser that they sold. They then proceeded to give the browser away for free** with every copy of Windows, thereby not owing Spyglass any of the commission. Spyglass threatened legal action but apparently never took any, opting to settle for an $8M payout for a piece of technology that made Microsoft hundreds of billions.
** I never understood why Spyglass didn't sue Microsoft on the basis that (by Microsoft's own declaration, as AC pointed out) Internet Explorer was an integral part of Windows, and thus some share of the sales revenue for every copy of Windows was de facto revenue from the sale of Internet Explorer. Maybe someone more familiar with the back-story can fill in this blank?
"Greenspan provided a list of reasons for increasing competition in the skilled labor force. In particular, he said it would help fix a problem -- the housing bubble -- that grew during his tenure as Fed chair, a position he held from 1987 to 2006."
This has always been about manipulating the labor market for the benefit of people like Gates and Zuckerberg.
You have to remember, companies would rather have an H1B with marginal qualifications rather than a citizen with marginal qualifications. I've seen programmers struggle because they have poor people skills even though they take "people classes". Should they just change careers?
Table-ized A.I.
There's an odd preference for already-employed people, so there's this kind of self-reinforcing phenomenon where, if you already have a job, you can easily get five job offers, but if you have no job, you can't get any job offers. Especially true if you've been unemployed for a non-negligible period of time: 3 months or something is fine, looks like you're just between jobs, but 3 years and employers start to assume there must be some horrible dark reason, and pass on the resume. Basically a variety of "social proof".
I suspect this is large part because companies have no reliable way of actually interviewing or screening potential hires, so they rely on these kind of tea-leaf-reading heuristics instead. Some of it is also that large companies are mostly looking to avoid bad hires, versus to get good hires. They might be passing up a great hire, but what they really care about is not hiring anyone who will rock the boat and cause problems.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The iDot... Apple's new (patent and copyright pending) way to end sentences and provide a break between the integer and fractional parts of a number. According to Apple, it looks better than the old "decimal point" that it replaces, it has more caché, has been designed with usability in mind, and it runs the latest version of iOS.
It is also fully compatible with your web browser and email system, and all such systems will be automatically upgraded to work with the new symbol.
A small licensing fee will be levied by Apple for the use of this incredible and ground-breaking new technology, and their lawyers will be in contact with each and every one of you in due course, to arrange your payment of this licensing fee, along with the pre-defined hourly rate for the lawyers' time spent on the case.
Failure to pay the licence fee and other associated fees will cause a general reduction in your attractiveness to the opposite sex, and infestation of Locusts to descend on your house, you will be afflicted with Cooties, and you will henceforth be referred to by anyone who hears about the failure to pay the license fee for such a useful and necessary implement as "that iDot".
Oh and if you believe the Urban Dictionary, ying-yang is the erroneous spelling of the phrase "yin-yang", which is the simplified form of "ynyáng", the Pnyn (phonetic method of representing Chinese characters in western script) spelling of the Chinese characters which define Yin and Yang. So, it looks like the OP is not the "iDot" in this case...
I'll make an argument, software development is a profession with logic at it's core. It's inherent in just about everything you do as a developer.
You hence need to be capable of logical thinking that is to be able to make logical deductions.
When you get a job as a developer you'll hence most likely be working with very logical people, people who can deduce when your arguments and ideas don't make sense, and will expect you to back down if you can't logically defend your claim.
GoodNewsJim.com is probably one of the most batshit crazy pits of insanity and illogic I have seen in a long time, hence, it's not surprising that for 10 years he has been unable to fit into a role that requires him to show at least some degree of logical reasoning.
But for what it's worth, his post was full of assertions with no actual argument, he told us he's competent, he told us he had a degree from Carnegie Mellon. He asserts his competence, he asserts his talent, but he provides no actual evidence of any of that. What has he worked on? what has he done? How does he know he is talented? The employers he dealt with obviously did not think so.
I got a job as a software developer before I even had any kind of degree. I can go out and find new development jobs within a couple of months if I wish to change jobs and I see very good payrises every time - even my first development job without a degree was paying well above the national average. I therefore have a hard time having any sympathy for people who claim they're awesome then whinge that they can't get a job given that I've always found it trivial even when I had less qualifications than guys like this, and despite living in a region that isn't exactly stand out for number of development jobs. People like him had every advantage over people like me, yet still couldn't find employment whilst I could. It's for this reason that I'm certain that they are the problem, not the industry. The wealth of listed jobs coupled with the incredibly low levels of unemployment in the industry back this up. If you can't get a software development job in a reasonable amount of time, then you are most definitely the problem. You're the 1 in 50 (the unemployed 2% in the industry) that are just unemployable.
Seriously, if you only average 1 interview a year in this industry there's something very fucking wrong with you - that implies they were rejecting him before he even met them. That takes quite some doing and a pretty crappy CV. Perhaps he plastered his CV with comments about how god spoke to him too?
He's not making fun of him for having religious beliefs, he's making fun of him for being completely oblivious to the fact that maybe he's unemployable because he's suffering delusions.
It's one thing to believe in some god, I think most people have no problem with that. It's not my cup of tea, but each to there own. However, it's a whole other thing to believe he speaks to you. That requires you to hear voices in your head. That requires you to be actually clinically insane.
People who are clinically insane tend not to be the best workers.
You'd have had a point if you'd instead talked about the fact we shouldn't joke about people who have mental health issues, then you'd be right.