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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).
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.
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."
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.'
It is more like a chain letter, but in reverse.
It should be: "Get 4 other people to sign up OR Microsoft will teach you how to code"
...
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."
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.
> 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?
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 didn't conveniently leave anything out. I highlighted the introduction of the idea and the demand from people that existed before any company (including PARC) started developing the idea into an actual product.
The Dynabook concept was introduced two years before PARC was created, so it's a bit ridiculous to suggest that they created the idea.
Keep pursuing the cheapest labour and pretty soon you will have no one to sell your code to, as no one will be afford to buy the devices to put the code on. It's all about balanced economies, not the greatest possible exploitation, not unlimited growth, not the highest possible productivity which in reality implies the cheapest possible labour (when will you guys and gals wake up to that one, what did you really think all that spin about increasing productivity really meant).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen