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Chicago School Official: US IT Jobs Offshored Because 'We Weren't Making Our Own' Coders
theodp writes: In a slick new video, segments of which were apparently filmed looking out from Google's Chicago headquarters giving it a nice high-tech vibe, Chicago Public Schools' CS4ALL staffers not-too-surprisingly argue that creating technology is "a power that everyone needs to have."
In the video, the Director of Computer Science and IT Education for the nation's third largest school district offers a take on why U.S. IT jobs were offshored that jibes nicely with the city's new computer science high school graduation requirement. From the transcript: "People still talk about it's all offshored, it's all in India and you know, there are some things that are there but they don't even realize some of the reasons that they went there in the first place is because we weren't making our own."
In the video, the Director of Computer Science and IT Education for the nation's third largest school district offers a take on why U.S. IT jobs were offshored that jibes nicely with the city's new computer science high school graduation requirement. From the transcript: "People still talk about it's all offshored, it's all in India and you know, there are some things that are there but they don't even realize some of the reasons that they went there in the first place is because we weren't making our own."
a database... what could ever be more complex? pity the endlessly undone digitarian hired goons..
More like the pants-on-fire dept.
How can we expect to make our own coders if companies aren't creating a real draw for people to learn coding? Corporations are sending a message that you must move to them as opposed to where you want to live, you must work long hours, commute an hour to work and an hour back, and be dumped at 40. What kind of insane person would consider that as a good life choice when coming out of high school?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Lock her up?
Yet another school official talking out of their ass.
Education personnel blame the crappy education system.
"People still talk about it's all offshored, it's all in India and you know, there are some things that are there but they don't even realize some of the reasons that they went there in the first place is because we weren't making our own."
There were plenty of programers. There has never been a "shortage". That is complete bullshit. The H-1B monkeys were brought into this country for one reason and one reason alone. Because they come from a background of extreme poverty and will gladly work for significantly lower wages. And in the process, hundreds of thousands of American workers lost their jobs so that they could be replaced by third world monkeys.
like the elderly.. not able to reach around like long ago...? fleas... certainly not predicted in the almanac?
I would estimate that a good percentage, upwards of 50%, of a CS program is foreign nationals. The schools are greedy, they prefer foreign tuition prices, no financial aid.
Why would you pay workers with their own free will when you can create a program of slaves and harvest the bounty of that program?
Thanks Apple, Google, Facebook, et al.
The only shortage of coders is those willing to work for half the normal pay. There's no other compelling reason to offshore. This idea that India (or wherever) is just brimming with more talented coders than the US is a myth pushed by corporations as an excuse to get access to more low wage coders.
The quality of school computer science education is dropping because the powers-that-be are trying to dumb down and demonetize programmers everywhere. This way they can't challenge AI when it gains the ability to "predict crime". Indian programmers get things done like Russian and Vietnamese soldiers; you have to throw a million of them at every small problem. Indians are being given leadership positions in U.S. tech companies for no obvious reason. The bankers are in control.
Chicago School Official: US IT Jobs Offshored Because 'We Weren't Making Our Own' Coders
Offshoring is about cost savings, not about availability of workers.
There are numerous examples of entire departments being dumped and replaced with cheap offshore labor.
Put in words that a Chicago School Official might understand: Liar, liar, pants on fire!
Corporations had a choice between making their own, or going to India: We know which one they chose. Now, everyone else is going to India, so they will too.
For the last 5 decades, there's been a surplus of labour allowing corporations to be fussy, then abusive, and then underpay employees. Some school proclaiming their "graduates are proficient in the language" that corporations choose, isn't going to fix either problem.
Algonquin College in Ottawa Ontario. They farmed out a simple system of keeping track of tests and students to an east indian firm called 'blackboard'. It was a disastrous shit show that never ended. Whenever I would try to bring the matter up as both a programming graduate and as a web developer they waved me off with dismissive remarks.
The system could have been developed by their own students easily and cheaply with a websocket, mongo database, and nodejs webserver. However then blame for bugs or issues would fall directly upon their shoulder and not on some far flung ethereal entity meaning people could directly challenge the problems and force them to be resolved.
I'm grasping for a reason why. To my mind there never was a good one. We could have built that system easily and cheaply, but they would not allow us to. By us I mean the students they handed diplomas to and said 'you are now considered professionally trained to perform these services'.
I know full well their training was sub standard and they were liars and charletons, that doesn't mean we did not posses these skills in spite of their limp half hearted efforts. It was obvious their interest was our wallets and not our minds. We could have done that task and been enriched for it, both materially and in our skill set and experience.
Lesson of warning to those of you either entering into an education or seeking one. If they will not hire their own product to do the work, be wary of their competence as they do not in their hearts believe think they have any to pass on else they would put their own product to work for themselves and everyone else with trust.
Seriously, what's the point of Government jobs if they're not going to employ Americans? This is what my tax dollars go to? Sending money overseas? And yes, it's my tax dollars too. State School systems get federal money.
This is why you're seeing the resurgence of neo-nazis and white supremacists. We're abandoning the working class. Same Bloody thing happened in Germany in 1944 and we ignored it then too because nobody wanted their taxes to go up. How's that quote go? Something about business getting out of hand and us being lucky to live through it...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Chicago has topped 500 murders this year...
http://homicides.suntimes.com/
Look at the sad, sad map
Plenty of coders and developers here in the US. Always has been. It's just they can pay a code monkey less overseas, or here if they get an H1B.
Also, Chicago school board is terrible. No wonder they are credulous at things Google says.
Fail the public, blame everyone but themselves.
Made by a school bureaucrat complaining about the lack of resources her domain is getting. News at 11.
Companies are trying to save a buck so they sent their programming work to India. In many cases, the work performed was shoddy.
Seriously, what's the point of Government jobs if they're not going to employ Americans? This is what my tax dollars go to? Sending money overseas? And yes, it's my tax dollars too. State School systems get federal money.
This is why you're seeing the resurgence of neo-nazis and white supremacists. We're abandoning the working class. Same Bloody thing happened in Germany in 1944 and we ignored it then too because nobody wanted their taxes to go up. How's that quote go? Something about business getting out of hand and us being lucky to live through it...
I've never found a liberal who could state a position without resorting to insults.
The inevitable result is that people simply stop, keep quiet, and get on with their lives. Then, in the privacy of the voting booth, they vote for the candidate promising reform, and against the candidate with insults and no real position.
Isn't that a better and simpler explanation than "nazis and supremacists"?
Twenty bucks says the director isn't offshored. That's what pisses me off about these fuckers.
Is there some way to arrest people who make false statements when justifying unpopular actions? The dude is so obviously full of shit that you can smell him down the hall...but he'll just keep spouting bullshit forever.
Is there some way to penalize him so he won't do it again?
The reason is GREED... We often get low quality programmer from offshore but as long as this looks cheaper on paper they dont care. They want to pay $20 an hour or less doesnt matter if the american programmer is far superior . Why go to school for 5 years , be in debt and the be replaced after a few years?
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
If the $24k car can be expected to last more than 8 times as long as the $3k car then a rational actor will buy the $24k car ... unless they know that someone else will be held responsible for transportation costs before that time is up.
With almost 800 murders in Chicago last year and ahead of that pace in 2017, they don't need more computer programmers. They need a U.N. Peacekeeping force. They haven't been teaching anyone how to shoot guns in high school either, yet somehow they learned on their own to be quite adept at it.
Americans are so unbelievably stupid that it's quite amazing that any employer would want to hire any of them.
The choice to claim there are no coders while leaving out the "at our pay rate" and sidelining hundreds of thousands of American coders who would rather be coding but are now working less desirable positions has had a profound effect on the industry. Before the last decade, there were always new things coming down the line big enough to soak up whatever CPU could be created. American coders drove hardware growth.
Today, the killer applications have not kept up. I'm using a 3-year-old machine, have the GPU turned off (which really should be running my AI assistant by this point in time), almost never cross 50% usage on my 32 GB of RAM, have less than half of my 256 GB SSD filled, average around 6% usage of my quad core (eight virtual) CPU, and am happy with the 17" 1080P screen. I'm not sure I've ever let my primary machine reach three years of age, much less been happy with it.
Software is lagging. The short-sighted dumping of hundreds of thousands of highly experienced American coders is the reason.
You bring up many valid points. Just remember though, not only liberals are being dumbed down. Both sides are being dumbed down. Whether its lax public school standards, media, culture, etc.. I do not know, but Americans are being dumbed down.
I've seen this for 30 years.
It was not lack of coders. It was ruthless and relentless offshoring and outsourcing because they were less expensive and more willing to work 80 hour weeks without pay.
Stop the H1B program for any job making under $150,000 a year and coders would be there.
Offshoring is usually bad enough that companies that they can't stick with it for too long.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
We are making them, businesses just don't like citizens. Kill every guest worker program, then see to it that citizens take their place.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
How you strive to out-dumb California, constantly. Restore education to 1970's standards, stop perpetuating that minimum wage jobs are careers and that college is the solution for everyone.
First of all, we know there is an oversupply of programmers in the Citizen population of the USA, so this whole idea they cannot find workers is a blatant lie.
The fact is, it should also be pointed out, that looking at the poverty and unemployment statistics (the real one, the labor participation rate which is at a record high), and we look at poverty rates say in inner cities, we have a huge amount of underutilized human capital sitting here. So it would make sense, we have all oif these unemployed people. Why not train them and rehabilitate them to do the jobs that we have available, instead of bringing in third world foreign labor? The reason this won't happen is that the DNC and the globalists must keep a large number of americans in poverty and ensure nothing is done to encourage them to be rehabilitated. Because if they did have jobs, it would be a disaster for the socialist agenda of the DNC which requires large numbers of poorly educated people on welfare for whom all the care about is getting their next welfare check. Since, if poverty were lower, fewer people would need welfare, if you want an ever expanding government, this is a disaster, because you can no longer buy their votes with welfare, instead they would vote for smaller taxes and less government if they are actually economically successful. Plus people on welfare tend to prioritize getting their next check more highly than more abstract issues like abuse of power and government corruption issues, and constitutional rights, limited goivernment, etc. the DNC is a totalitarian party that wants absolute power for itself and is able to keep people trapped on welfare in order to ensure a reliable supply of voters, and then use the White population as the scapegoat.
It's interesting that some of these inner cities like Washington DC spend $29,000 per student yet 83% cannot read. Its like they intentionally try to mismanage the education system so badly as to make them unemployable. The so called teachers know that as long as they can keep their subjects poorly educated, they will go on welfare and thus the DNC will have a reliable source of poorly educated welfare voters. Thus the teachers unions keep on getting their pay raises for not educating students. So the teachers instead spend all of their time teaching sociology garbage about how a black person doesnt have a chance in America because of systemic racism, so the blacks come out of their with no useful skills, but with their heads filled with crap about how everything wrong with their lives is because of evil white people, and thus the only choice is to go on welfare, thus be a reliable DNC voter. Nothing scares the DNC more than black americans actually increasing their standard of living and reducing the poverty rate, because they would become tax payers and would become conservative Republicans. The DNC could no longer dupe them with the lies that the only way they can survive is with welfare.
Then, they give away the jobs to foreign aliens. Then we have people like Colon Krappernick who tells lies that its the evil white Republican that keeps the blacks down. This is despite the fact this is a lie, there is virtually no racial discrimination in the US economy. There are poverty problems, but it has nothing to do with race, it has a lot to do with foreign aliens stealing jobs, the education system, and the cultural degradation coming from Hollywood which is corrupting the youth. The blacks then vote for the DNC who help foreign aliens steal all kinds of jobs from them (high skill and low skill via Mexican illegal immigrant labor), and with the help of hollywood liberals, systematically attack families, children, the church, and the moral fabric of society, leading to poor environment for raising children into adults. The DNC then gives them huge welfare payments because it gave their jobs away to foreign aliens. They then keep on voting for the DNC for the welfare payments while it helps foreign aliens steal their jobs, and then blames black poverty on some white people stru
Project based learning requires itches (aka opportunities) to scratch that you are willing to pay for. Further students need to feel ownership over the problems you challenge them to solve to bring that type of problem based learning to the real world for real career gains.
Bull. Fucking. Shit.
You desire to under pay workers does not magically make them not exist.
This cabal of globalism headed by Google, Facebook and Apple and ECB/US governmental Banking entities all have one thing in common:
1) Complain about labor for every reason except the real one, we don't want to pay and we won't because we payed off all of the judges and politicians to insure no other companies can compete against us, so we make the labor rules. One of those rules is we want people too live in a card board box.
While I Zuckerburg get to live on my own private island and come up with ideas like Universal Income so you don't get mad at me screwing you up the ass along with the rest of my globalist friends.
2) Complete abdication of the law. No Rule of law that is equally applied to everyone, only law and order which is crime and punishment, but only if you are not part of the globalist cabal which completely ignore trade, human rights, taxes. The get their own laws which insure they always escape punishment.
3) Spew media corpratist bull crap from CNN, FoxNews and various other state owned media companies which sit there and tell you you have to do well in school, tell you to study engineering and computer science and go into debt for 100K and then promptly forget to hire you because you are too expensive anyway.
I am not surprised nor would I regret a nice little uprising when you idots out there finally figure this out enmass and decide to do something about it.
I may even help you.
The same CPS that struggles to graduate kids from High School.
The one that struggles to turn out kids who can handle college.
The one that struggles to turn out college-ready kids who DO NOT need massive amounts of remedial courses.
The one who thinks that simply throwing more money at a failed system will, somehow, magically transform them into a success (and we wonder why the KIDS are so dumb...)
And no. The main reason why jobs like this are offshored isn't because we don't have enough programmers.
It's a cost-saving thing. Why pay a US coder a decent salary when they can just offshore, or if required to keep the job in the states, demand 30 years of experience in a 3 year old technology, and then pass the job to an H1B farm for pennies on the dollar?
Like every other political group in Illinois, talking out their ass is a required skill.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
No. We werent making coders CHEAP. Offshoring is all about money. Too many recent examples to list.
I've seen it it in progress. Programmers have been actively and continually replaced with offshore workers where I work. In an organization of about 1200 people, less than 100 are American by birth, and a lot of the workers are transient. That is to say, they work here for a while, and then work from offshore. The Senior VP of the department above is actively trying to get rid of employees and replace them with offshore workers or contract employees when possible. The previous CIO would actively remove people at the end of a project, I'm guessing because the Senior VP made him do it, effectively preventing any subject matter expertise from sticking around. The self induced brain drain is so bad that for every good programmer where I work there are literally 95 bad ones and 4 average ones.
I would invite all the complainers on here to reconsider Marc's analysis of capital. All things being complained about from companies squeezing labour to exploiting foreign lands are analysed and predicted in his works. Of course the consensus has been to dismiss such analysis over the years but its stood the test of time. Maybe a bit of good old fashioned socialism might just be the pill the good ol US of A needs. Then of course it'll probably be too late.
Alright, sure.
I don't like immigration because it massively inflates the supply of labour, which in turn drives down wages and living standards for people like me who have to work for a living. The costs, both tangible and intangible, of this immigration, aren't paid for by the people who benefit from the reduction in wages and collective bargaining power of labour. Restricting immigration and enforcing immigration law will slow the rate at which my country is becoming more diverse, maybe even reversing that "progress" and make it more white - and I don't care.
Please tell me where I'm wrong.
Just the sort of stuff you would expect from the Chicago educational system. Not that there aren't some good teachers there, but the politics of the administrators is one of the big things killing that state. Coding needs to be a class like auto shop or home ec -- optional for those who want it. There are orders of magnitude differences in capability of working programmers and the general population is even more diverse. Out west here I could make a compelling case for required education in air conditioning repair as a basic skill that would have more validity that these slimeballs.
I am not a computer scientist/engineer/whatever they're call in silicon valley. And I am not based on the US so I might be getting this all wrong. It feels to me that "computer science" is being sold to the students simply as app-creators, you know, develope your idea in a garage and can still make millions.
I don't think coding, with it's what's all about, has a lot of wider applications well beyond making apps for iDevices or androids. I'm a biologist and I generate so much data on a dialy basis, that if I had to do all the analysis using a spreadsheet (I've seen people doing this with Excel) it would probably take me years. Using MATLAB/Python/Julia I can create more or less complex routines that I can use to, for example, analyse the growth of microbes on certain conditions and even their genome. Nothing to do with computers at all, but being able to code helps a lot.
I wonder if instead of silicon valley they use other contexts, students could be a bit more engaged...?
I disagree. Liberals are unable to think for themselves anymore. They are literally screaming that gays and women are being suppressed while they are preventing gays and women from speaking at Berkley.
Pelosi, a woman democrat house member, was shouted down for... talking to Trump. Yep, even if you ATTEMPT to work with the other side you become unacceptable, even if you get the left what it wants. They are raging morons now. It is not both sides. How can you be for "free speech" as you riot because you don't want someone to give a speech?
My son graduated BC with two degrees and couldnâ(TM)t find a programming job for a year. This is the main reason why more Americans do not go into the Computer Science field.
Your subject really would have worked better if you had worded differently. Insane would be just crazy, abnormal, random behavior which could manifest harm to oneself or others. This actually does kind of make sense, but I am not sure it totally covers all of their intent.
I propose a modification to the term as insidious. This actually provides the full intent of their actions. Any other term would mean that they did not intentionally want the outcome any different than what they obtained.
Be US isn't making their own coders? Do something about this! Now!
It is easy to see that with morons like this running schools where the education deficiency. Even this idiot knows it is the cheap, exploitable labor that drives visas. They do not care that visa workers are incompetent as they have their bonus and are long gone before the stockholders feel the pain.
Competition is the culprit. It's too expensive to pay an american coder when you can pay for a hindu or other for a lesser price. Can you work for under 2k/month? No? Other people can. Americans need to look for jobs that aren't so easily offshored, is all. In regards to technology I'm afraid you'll have to look at jobs that require security clearances, otherwise, look for something else.
Rushed, sloppy, poor quality code is not insanity, it's a very rational response to corporations applying almost infinite coding discount factors where future costs/returns are completely ignored. Production metrics for code, and personal rankings, are geared to quickly producing something not demonstrably wrong on a minimal, and often unrealistic, set of test data.
Why do you think IT jobs are out sourced to India? Education? No cost. Cheap labor abounds in India. It has nothing to do with labor shortages in the U.S.
Economic data clearly shows you do not have a labor shortage. But if you are trying to depress wages, then flooding the market with programmers is the way to do it.
You're a fucking school. Make some fucking coders.
Don't forget to add "the same CPS that has a huge underfunded pension problem".
Fuck the pension fund. I'm supremely indifferent to the Chicago politics that caused hyper-inflated pensions to be assigned to a bunch of greedy bastards and then kicked down the road.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
This conveniently forgets the rounds of layoffs that numerous companies have done. Working Americans were dumped in favor of cheaper offshore programmers.
If the problem is strictly a lack of programmers, this would never have happened. Not once, let alone repeatedly.
The best part is when the company offers severance contingent upon training the replacements. They recognize the value of institutional knowledge while totally dismissing the value of their employees.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
We don't need any lectures from Chicago public school system on educating coders when the city passed an ordinance to raise minimum wage to $13 by 2019.
The city cries about lack of qualified labor while mandating a minimum wage that drives away jobs. Offshoring doesn't happen due to lack of qualified labor it happens because cheaper labor is readily available elsewhere. Chicago has a wage competition problem not a labor pool problem.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
a database... what could ever be more complex? pity the endlessly undone digitarian hired goons..
If it's complex, you're doing it wrong. However it seems like the whole IT industry has been doing it wrong for a long time.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
They offshored jobs because they could pay them a hell of a lot less.
Example: I think it was PG&E in California that offshored their IT, and forcing their current employees to train their cheaper replacements.
I worked at IBM (Not an IBMer or LTS, I was a contractor).
The department I worked in moved jobs out of country, and I was laid off with many people in the mid 2000's. While we trained our replacements, who were paid much less than us, we found out that the only requirement they needed to have for the job was "Speak English". One person we trained had no experience on a computer and had problems finding things on the keyboard (they hen-pecked the typing), but they could speak enough English to RTFM and follow a script.
For Americans, we needed a Bachelor Degree and 2 years of relevant experience (Or no degree and 6 years of relevant experience, you get that from military people usually BTW). Replace those with out of country workers that only needed to "Speak English". That's been my experience with offshoring more times than I can count.
Tech companies have been firing senior coders and engineering staff for the last 10+ years and hiring cheap H1B labor or outsourcing overseas. It has nothing to do with a nonexistent labor shortage.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
It's all about the dollars. It's cheaper to hire foreign labor, and cheaper = competitive. We just had a high-level company meeting where the CEO went on a screed about this, clearly trying to paint offshoring as the holy grail, and every single reason he gave was related to the cost differential. He didn't say word one about not being able to find local talent, though I'm sure that's the tale they spin when requesting additional visas.
The "we weren't making our own" argument is complete bullcrap. There are many many incidents of ageism and just cost cutting involved in the off-shoring trend. From a 40 year old dominos delivery driver delivery pizzas to his younger former co-workers ... to many examples of staff laid off and only getting their separation package because they stayed on long enough to train their off shore replacements. I used to have no more than a 2 week break between contracts. From the mid 1990's to the side 2010s the off shore market rose dominated and started to decline. And part of the reason for the decline was the ever strong influx of H1-B workers paid considerably less than the workers they displaced.
... I imaging we are laughed at for our industrial security. Much like the article were a foreign descent person was found after hours in a medical sciences company conference room, uninvited, and had downloaded files from the company servers using two laptops and a tablet. Only discovered because an officer of the company working late discovered him on the way out of the building. This helps lessen the unique talents of US workers by displacing their value (the value of their work product) overseas as well. Hiring these potential spies who accept lessor rates of pay just to position themselves in the US, as well as just hiring overseas candidates at lower rates than their US counterparts hurts the economy longterm. But US companies are all about short term gain, all too often, and fail to see the longterm implications.
... Your competitors may end up paying less for their outsourced project benefiting from code written on your dime. You need strict controls in place. And an organization you can hold accountable if your companies "crown jewels" end up in other companies hands.
The US has a huge unused reserve of technical workers that were laid off, and could never find a secure job footing again for two decades. And as a result of our policies we actually endanger national security as a small fraction of those State Department sponsored students who graduate and are hired (skilled people they are!) and a small portion of H1-B tech workers are spying on US technology and shipping it overseas. Consider that we only catch and expose those that aren't smart enough to not get caught.
We treat this problem as if we were boxers following the Marquis de Queensbury rules. No low blows, can't hit someone whose down, etc. These rest of the world is playing no holds barred mui thai
Sure, hire the best and brightest overseas talent. But you don't really want to hire newly minted overseas programmers because they cost 20% less, when the real cost is higher. And worse, when you outsource whole projects your source code isn't really yours anymore
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
You're wrong in thinking that politicians like Trump are on your side. (Before I get jumped on by partisans, note that I would say the same thing about most politicians, regardless of party.)
In the global market, there is no reason to prefer higher paid Americans.
We are addressing the low-income persons in the world before the lower income persons in the US.
Now, new companies are being set up to train developers in PH, and ID, and TH in order to develop the questioning skills needed, in order to make the skill set comparable to new grads in the US.
But, because the cost of living is so much cheaper, companies can pay slightly more than the going rate for a coder-farm, but get coders who are equivalent to an Westerner with a Bachelors and 2-3 years exp. The rate for the local is still stupidly good for the area, and thus makes for a win-win situation for the workers and the foreign company.
A former co-worker of mine took his USD 200k salary, lives in Thailand, (flys to california when needed), and locally in TH, helps to train the foreign workers in Thailand. Bringing up the value for the local (thai) economy. Decreasing cost for company, and increasing the value per person.
The real question is whether an introduction to coding makes the students more trainable for jobs they might get. Those jobs do not only include those where computer programming is 100% of the job. In Chicago, that includes whether students would be better prepared to be CNC machinists. I have my doubts about the Chicago Public Schools' ability to assess the skill platform to develop and the curriculum to develop a facility for further learning in the field.
Alas, the programming industry started off on the wrong foot because employees arrived self-trained. I refer to the industry after microcomputers changed it completely. When it was all IBM mainframes, programmer was something of a profession, guys in ties and coats, math degrees and training in the shop.
When the notion of just writing software alone, not as a free add-on to a million-dollar computer, came along for PCs, the programmers were all enthused self-taught hobbyists and industry, well, got spoiled early. The book "Hackers" (Steven Levy, 1984) writes of Sierra On-Line "training" game programmers, but just about the gaming tricks in 8-bit: they only hired already-fanatic young hackers.
So everybody tried to become a self-taught hacker; after Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard and got rich, dropping out of U became almost a badge of honor, of your willingness to risk your career on your talent and hard work alone.
If IT could become a profession - like Medicine, Law, Engineering, Teaching, Accounting - with actual requirements and competence tests - it would change a lot of things. Women piled into Medicine and Law despite the sexism they encountered: Medicine and Law are our best-compensated, most-respected professions. Why should they put up with sexism to get a shit-job competing with foreign wages and tossed at the first grey hair?
And you'd find people lining up to get the degrees that would get them into this respected profession. RIght now, you see CS class enrollment bounce up and down with every bit of good and bad news out of Silicon Valley.
I call bullshit. In fact, show me a job requiring coders, tell me how many and what type you need and I will produce them.
Would you say the same thing about Hillary Clinton?
IT is an overhead function is ALL companies that don't do computing as their primary product. That's pretty much the majority of all IT jobs. Any role in a corporation that is not the primary product such as Facilities, ES&H, Accounting, Legal, Security, and even executives BTW, are all "overhead" activities. AKA Cost Centers.
IT is overhead because it's a shared resource not specifically dedicated to the value chain of the firm, thus by accounting rules, that's overhead or GS&A. The opposite is "Cost of Goods & Services" or COGS which is 1:1 between revenue dollars and units manufactured and sold. AKA Profit Centers.
When you can't draw a 1:1 correspondence between revenue and cost, it's overhead and that same lack of a direct line between the two makes it harder to justify well. This is where IT costs has been continuously squeezed in all corporations since the 1980s. This is also why it's SUPER HIGHLY prone to being outsourced. It's NOT in the core competency of the firm (if it were, it would be COGS). That also makes it SUPER HIGHLY prone to being outsourced.
In general, there is nothing you can do to make IT so essential it won't be outsourced short of changing your business model to sell "IT as a product" - and the LOL of that if your own IT will itself be overhead also even as you sell IT as a product!
Because it's it's overhead instead, and prone to being outsourced, it will always be squeezed on cost and thus jobs doing IT will always be at risk for elimination or outsourcing. THIS IS WHY IT IS OUTSOURCED!! It's NOT an issue with supply of labor - we have plenty of IT people. The problem is the strategic value and price sensitivity due to it's nonspecific role in a corporation and the legal rules of accounting related to that. And frankly you are NOT going to change accounting rules to "fix" it.
If you want programmer jobs that both are secure and well-paying, you MUST be in the value chain of any corporation. That means product R&D that involves software as a component or as an operational service. Otherwise you are wasting your time - which apparently includes the author of the linked article. Sad. To be so utterly clueless yet trying to fix things.
It makes sense, it's just not good news for people hoping for a good income from such work. The rich started the war with off-shoring, and now they are recruiting the poor to make them allies in crushing the middle class. I'm not even remotely a communist, but in this case, the shoe kinda fits, you know?
We are graduating coders who can't find jobs because all the entry level jobs are off-shored. I know because I work at a community college and provide references for IT students.