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Seeking Coders, Tech Titans Turn To K-12 Schools

Posted by Soulskill on from the building-an-army dept.

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."

4 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Motives by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  2. The first few comments are awfully pessimistic by NitsujTPU · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:The first few comments are awfully pessimistic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:The first few comments are awfully pessimistic by rwa2 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.