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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).
The one percent will always need them.
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.
So what? They still create jobs.
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.
No, they're creating cheap employees.
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.
They guess, you will continue to learn after this hour, because you want to extend your program to do more cool stuff.
Especially if that framework has only existed for 15 minutes.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
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.
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 words, most people are taught to be employees. People with an aptitude for business should be taught early in the same way math is taught at an early age.
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?
> 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?
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.
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 not completely linked to this else there would be fewer grounds keepers, home health workers, maids, and so on. What makes a job is the the capital resources being availible to fullfil a want or need and that simply does not happen without excess money from somewhere. Employers create jobs more than non employers because they have the resources and the majority of framework involved already in place and are in a better position to capitalize on opertunity. You seem to confuse oppertunity with job creation. You should not do that because in a lot of situations, it is the ability to exploit that oppertunity not the fact that it exists.
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?
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?
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.