Seeking Coders, Tech Titans Turn To K-12 Schools

theodp writes: Politico reports on how a tech PR blitz on the importance of coding in K-12 schools has won over President Obama, who's now been dubbed the "coder-in-chief" after sitting down Monday to "write" a few lines of computer code with middle school students as part of a PR campaign for the Hour of Code, which has earned bipartisan support in Washington. From the article: "The $30 million campaign to promote computer science education has been financed by the tech industry, led by Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, with corporate contributions from Microsoft, Google, Amazon and other giants. It's been a smash success: So many students opened up a free coding tutorial on Monday that the host website crashed. But the campaign has also stirred unease from some educators concerned about the growing influence of corporations in public schools. And it's raised questions about the motives of tech companies, which are sounding an alarm about the lack of computer training in American schools even as they lobby Congress for more H-1B visas to bring in foreign programmers."

Comments

Motives

[Anonymous Coward]

The motive of tech companies is to fill the pipeline with cheap labor.

Re:Motives

[preaction]

... as a source of cheap labor.

The first few comments are awfully pessimistic

[NitsujTPU]

You know, it may sound like a cliche, but the world is becoming more and more reliant on computer technology. You shouldn't look at this as Microsoft looking to churn out cheap help to build Word 2025. That's just not what they're doing. Microsoft engineers aren't poorly compensated for their efforts. Their among the most highly-compensated coders out there.

These are folks who have seen computers completely transform the world around them, and they foresee this trend continuing (probably wisely). There will always be gluts here and there, or shortages here and there, but the fact is that if you want an army of super-intelligent robots cleaning our oceans, helping feed the planet, and maintaining our future space stations, then you're going to need many many more capable coders than we have now.

Re:The first few comments are awfully pessimistic

[turkeydance]

well, of course, more labor decreases wages. and, then, when the robots can code.....c ya.

Re:The first few comments are awfully pessimistic

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't let the name of a company blind you. I've been a Microsoft developer. They have multiple teams doing almost exactly the same, but just with slight changes. Those teams should be merged and the products would be greatly improved. The company is full of waste. Up until recently the employee evaluation system was extremely hostile. If you didn't stab someone in the back, you'd be the one with the knife in your back. Unless your team was lucky enough to hire a bad programmer. Then you could just churn through the newbies and the rest of your team was safe. It will be awhile until that culture dies out.

These folks are blinded by the tech around them. They don't see anything but tech. They assume the whole world uses and runs on tech. It doesn't. While it's true that there's way more programs, apps, websites, and solutions out there now, most of them are duplicates. There are tons of programs and libraries doing the same things.

And we don't need many, many more programmers. We need higher quality programmers. There's way too much crap. Had software been designed and written correctly, the entire software security industry would disappear. It exists entirely due to crappy or uninformed programmers and deadline pushing higher-ups.

Re:The first few comments are awfully pessimistic

[Anonymous Coward]

You shouldn't look at this as Microsoft looking to churn out cheap help to build Word 2025. That's just not what they're doing. Microsoft engineers aren't poorly compensated for their efforts. Their among the most highly-compensated coders out there.

In other words, Microsoft could save a good sum of money if they could spend less on coders. By increasing the supply of coders they could drive those costs down.

It isn't out of the goodness of their venomous heart that Microsoft is doing this. No, they're doing it to pay less money to people like you (assuming you're in IT).

Re:The first few comments are awfully pessimistic

[rwa2]

I live in Redmond. Microsoft has enough coders. They just laid a bunch of them off. What they want are cheaper coders to throw at their projects. That's why they're working so hard to bring in lots of H1Bs. Many of the H1Bs are not earnestly brought here to do the work. They're just here to flood the market with tech workers to reduce tech wages for everyone.

Many of the MS H1Bs do end up leaving/escaping MS and working elsewhere in the region. Still, it isn't enough to get Seattle Tech wages down low enough (though they certainly are competitive vs. Silicon Valley wages). A big reason why Boeing has pushed hard to leave the Puget Sound region is because their engineering wages simply can't compete with the relatively high MS and Amazon wages for tech work.

OTOH, MS has done much to improve the quality of life here in Seattle, investing in infrastructure and museums and businesses and other perks to attract top programmers. Boeing has always sorta taken the opposite approach, opening their factories in the crappiest, drug-infested neighborhoods in a effort to keep costs down and making their quality-of-living investments elsewhere if possible.

Re:The first few comments are awfully pessimistic

[Livius]

When wages goes down, there will be a lot more projects that will suddenly be feasible to implement.

I guess that's why the low wages led to zero unemployment.

Oh, wait...

Re:The first few comments are awfully pessimistic

[BarbaraHudson]

That's not the worst that can happen... When wages goes down, there will be a lot more projects that will suddenly be feasible to implement.

When wages go down, there will be a lot more crap projects that should never see the light of day that will suddenly be feasible to implement.

FTFY

Not to mention that the barriers to entry are already too low in many respects (just 'cuz you can cut-n-paste code doesn't make you a developer) and each "gold rush" phase is shorter than the previous one (look at how fast mobile development got unprofitable for 99.5% of all developers).

An Infinite Number of Monkeys with Keyboards?

[Irate Engineer]

It seems the tech industry is doing everything it can to increase the population of code monkeys in the world, and finding new ways to work them harder and harder for less and less pay. So that is how the Singularity will be achieved - enough monkeys beating on keyboards, eventually one of them will inadvertently make sentient computer. And it will be Wi-fi enabled, of course, so we're pretty much hosed after that.

Astroturf stuff as narrative for higher H1b quota

[echtertyp]

It's pretty transparent really. To "sell" the idea of ever higher H1b quotas, the titans like Zuckerberg have to put on a convincing act, with feigned signs of desperation about hiring. Part of that act is dog and pony stunts , astroturf campaigns, etc. Anything to create a "narrative" as they say in U.S. media where it becomes accepted wisdom that desperate measures are needed to bring on more programmers. ( As long as one doesn't look at actual numbers, such as wage changes indicating market forces responding to shortages, or anything like that )

Laugh

[koan]

I just have this vision of coders as the next shortorder cooks.

Seeking Cheaper Coders

[plasticsquirrel]

FTFY... Duh, supply and demand. If we were lacking programmers, SALARIES WOULD GO UP. Instead, salaries have stayed the same or gone down. What we have is not a lack of programmers, but a lack of cheap programmers that can be treated like interchangeable cogs in a machine. "Buy one for $15,000 a year, fluent in the latest version of Flub!"

Hmm, lets see here

[s.petry]

Instead of teaching people a specific programming language then, why not teach them everything else that they should be learning in school anyway which makes a good programmer. Want a list? Okay smartass here is a list.

1. Language - More is better so that people can freely share and exchange ideas but at least English Grammar and Composition in the US.

2. Rhetoric and Logic - Logic teaches critical thinking skills as well as morality, and rhetoric further improves communication skills and rational discourse and debate (both of these things are painfully absent from academia today)

3. Math - Again more is better. Algebra and variables are the basis for simple programming language skills. This teaches the use of variables without locking someone into a restricted interface for coding in a specific language.

4. Supplement this curriculum with history economics which extends language and provides ample material for debate and discourse.

5. Further supplement the curriculum with Music theory to better learn Trig, and sciences to further their abilities with math and critical thinking.

Wow, sounds just about like classes we had in the US until the 1930s when we adopted the Prussian designed "Industrial Education system" which made people smart enough to calculate artillery range but too damn stupid to question orders doesn't it? Oh, you may not know this part of history since it's buried in piles of bureaucratic shit to hide it.. but it's there!

So why are we teaching very special bits of information and ignoring a classical education system which produced every single well known scientist in history? Still does really, because the best and brightest today go to private schools which do use the classical methods and not what public schools have become. Cui Bono. Well, large businesses that currently control everything benefit because people will be smart enough to follow instructions to make some piece of code work, but not smart enough to question why they make the code or question their economic status for doing so. Government institutions will do the same thing for the same reasons.

If what you said is true, "it's only for the children" I'll say prove it! Not one piece of public education today has been institutionalized "for the children" so why would you claim this piece is different? I believe it's just another appeal to emotion fantasy and has no connection with reality. I have history on my side, you have nothing but a delusion.

Re:Delusional much?

[BVis]

If what you say is true, then the efforts to suppress wages won't work, as the "graduates" won't be able to fill the roles required of them

Sure they will. They're warm bodies that will accept below-market salaries. Yes, the product they turn out will be total shit, but it was CHEAP total shit, and that's really all that matters to the non-technical management types.