Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Co-opts Ice Bucket Challenge Idea To Promote Coding In Latin America
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).
It's greed, right? I assume the goal isn't to help out people, but to flood the labor pool in order to benefit their company.
The one percent will always need them.
Just wait 'til you shows up for an interview at Microsoft headquarters claiming to a programmer with "one hour of experience" and get laughed out of the office.
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.
...Microsoft wants Latin America to become the new India.
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? This could change it all.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
You failed to approve submissions RE: Robin Williams death yet you push this shit?
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?
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.
All tech giants really want is cheap labor, making tech giants a threat.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
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.
This makes absolutely no sense.
This is Microsoft to offer free online courses in latin America.
Not, you have to take this programming course or dump water on yourself or something.
i'm super torn on this. I love that people are getting access to education that they don't usually get, but at the same time I feel that's just so later they can go 'Well, America doesn't have the skills we need, so we need cheap visa workers to work in this field.'
More 'Chain Letter' spam.
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 for eleventy billion dollars. It's probably the best time to be in software development, ever.
Don't begrudge these kids sharing the joy of learning to code. What kind of small-minded person are you that would keep a child from the same kind of education that brought you so much fulfillment? Do you really live your life in fear that someone is going to take your job? Maybe you should take all that energy you are wasting on fearing others and trying to keep them down and put it into bettering yourself.
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.
Holy crap you are a moron.
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.
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?
Self-driving trucks? Only to move items between the rail terminal and the drone delivery center.
Don't begrudge these kids sharing the joy of learning to code. What kind of small-minded person are you that would keep a child from the same kind of education that brought you so much fulfilment (sic)?
Most of us are self-taught and maybe we went to college or university at some point to obtain that piece of paper every human resources drone demands. Nobody needed to spoon-feed us. We were/are curious about computers and we learned to control them via writing computer programmes.
> 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?
google canada, temporary foreign worker program....
think hard
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 consumers in the US have figured it out and are not buying the FUD anymore.
You'll still be able to get a job, it just won't pay what it used to.?
No. You won't be able to get a job unless your skin is brown enough. It won't matter that you're actually willing to work for lower wages. If you're white, assumptions will be made.
I agree! I was looking for the Like button :-)
And just yesterday I was thinking how refreshing it was that for the past couple weeks I did not come across any story, headline, or comment about that stupid ice bucket challenge.
Developing desktop applications for Windows 3.1 with Kraig Brockschmidt's "Inside OLE" as the tutorial was a lot like having a bucket of ice water dumped on your head
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 in the real world, made of materials that actually existed. And that's how we got the desktop GUI.
Kay had a wish "I wish for a kid's toy that's tablet sized, with a battery that lasts forever". Xerox and Apple started with the wish and developed something doable - and completely different from Kay's original vision. Kay jad wished for a children's device, Apple and Xerox created the desktop computer GUI for adults, something nobody had asked for.
the Bucket
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 is a source in case you are interested, which shows that out of 24 million in donations they claim 21 million in "expenses" leaving a whopping 3 million for actual donation. Sadly this gets them a 4 star rating, because many charities only donate a fraction of a percent and yet can still be tax exempt "charities".
Microsoft could easily be using this for a similar objective. Obviously these programs entitle them to a tax write off, but longer term leads to reduced developer pay so increased profits. India and China have been increasing in costs, and are not that far from the US in costs for developers today. Obviously this is also used for public relations (propaganda).
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
So they are looking for young people only? But why?
Now that Ballmer's gone, the boys can play.
Our parents and students spent hundreds of thousands to pay for college. What do we get in return? Congress approved, H1B state educated (free) foreign workers.
What do they care in Washington. Once USA is over they will put their butts in jets and fly to second homes in some remote country.
It will longer than five years for that on a macro scale!
......this was so 3 months ago....
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.
Oh, FFS, you mean to tell me you never read a tutorial or stackexchange? I'm guessing you look down your nose at people who did a massive online courseware course, too.
We are talking about a brief intro for kids, and you have a problem with that because you think those kids will eventually outcompete you?
Fuck you, you small minded twat.
I was autodidactic for years before college too, but even I read some fucking books and so forth. You act like these Latin American kids are getting some unfair advantage. Really? Really?!
Fuck you again.
Holy crap, I was making well over 100k/yr within 3 years of graduating in 2003, despite the bleak outlook.
Maybe the problem is you, not these scary brown-colored kids learning to program. I hate your kind for trying to keep children from learning just so you can try to protect your marginal employability. That's pretty evil of you.
FFS, improve yourself and your skillset. Be less of a codemonkey cog and more of a valuable asset a company would be sad to lose. Then leverage that to your advantage.
Now, that's what I call co-opting an ice bucket challenge
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF4trMQuZbk
"technical complexity in application development tools is a myth ... everyone can do it"
Well, maybe anyone can code like Microsoft... but that's not really something to aspire to
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.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
The one-year view of world history seems to those of us older than about twelve to be somewhat short-sighted.